


Edge of the World

by Corby (corbyinoz)



Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-14 22:38:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 46,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8031670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corbyinoz/pseuds/Corby
Summary: When returning from a rescue mission, Thunderbird Two is attacked by an unknown force. As Virgil and Gordon plummet towards the ocean, their chances of survival will depend, as it always does, on each other.





	1. Fall Together

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always to my wonderful beta, Solleil Lumiere. This is a long fic, and at the beginning, it's in an area in which I don't do much writing, good old action/adventure. I hope you enjoy the ride.
> 
> For those wary of reading WIPs, I do have about 24,000 words done, so there is plenty to come.

Chapter 1

It hit them just as Virgil dropped down below the low cloud cover across the sea 185 klicks to the north of Scotland.

The rescue had been one of the most brutal Virgil had ever taken part in. A research hut perched on sea ice had slid and fallen down an immense crack that had opened down to the sea below, ending up wedged only a couple of metres above the black waves even as gale conditions pounded it from above. Scott quickly determined that any attempt to lift the hut using grappling lines was doomed to failure; it had been essentially destroyed by the ice gripping and shifting against it, and even if he had been able to free it by lowering himself down there, it would come apart once taken from the ice’s grip. So when Thunderbird Two arrived it was decided that Thunderbird Four would be dropped in the open sea and Gordon would navigate his way deep under the ice to come up beneath the suspended hut and rescue the researchers from below.

Virgil didn’t know the exact difficulties of such a dive, but he could imagine, and he knew categorically that there was no one else on the planet he would trust to make it except his younger brother. The area of breakaway ice, several kilometres in size, still moved with the forces of wind and waves now battering it. Virgil could only guess at the limited visibility, the hazardous irregularity of the ice, the swirling current. He and Scott were compelled to sit above, resisting the wind in One and Two in order to keep grappling lines as stabilisers on the hut, while Gordon found his way under the ice and up through the crevasse. Once there he exited Four to stand on her roof and cut a hole through the wall of the hut, fighting for balance as the water lifted and fell beneath him. 

He reported five scientists, all injured, three ambulant. It took almost two hours in the horrendous conditions to manoeuvre the hover stretcher up to the hut, load it with the worst injured, and bring it back for dry entry as Four, buoyant and resilient, floated between the ice walls, its engines working overtime to keep it in place. The others made it down with help from Gordon below, and then the task of finding his way back out from under the heaving, groaning mass of ice began.

It took almost five hours in total, and if Four was battered and dented and scraped by the end of it, Gordon was not much better. Twice, Four was lifted unexpectedly to smash into ice and hut above, catching Gordon in between and forcing him to slam down where and how he could to avoid being crushed to death.

Still, as Scott said, it was a successful mission. There were five people now, bedded down at research station Zackenberg, who had spent much of the day staring at death and who could now begin to accept they had a future again, thanks to IR. And that was a good feeling, no doubt of it, even if the act of waiting helplessly as his younger brother did all the work was never a part of a mission in which Virgil took satisfaction. The fact he’d spent those five hours keeping Two something like stable in terrifying winds as he secured the hut didn’t enter into his calculations of who had done what on this one. Scott left the area first once everyone was secure, heading home across Europe and Asia and then via Sydney to pick up Alan and Kayo, which left Two to rise above the storm and head south to Scotland.

There was just one problem, as Virgil saw it.

Gordon was exhausted.

A tired Scott would have driven him to distraction with a series of questions his mind was too burned through to register as already answered. Had they secured X? Did they remember Y? Had they heard from John? Did they secure X? Virgil? X? And Virgil would answer patiently, by rote, as he switched off most of it and concentrated on getting them home. John, immensely practical as he was, would have been asleep as they took off for home, and Alan would be little different, his fully on button merely the flip side of his equally effective fully off one. Once Alan stopped he stopped completely, and after chattering wildly for a good ten minutes would have suddenly become silent, even in mid-sentence, and then replaced whatever he was going to say with a snore.  
But Tired Gordon? Tired Gordon had no filters. No social awareness. And no off switch. 

“That woman so had the hots for you, Virge.”

“Mmm.”

“The way she swooned all over you? May as well have put up a neon sign.”

Virgil considered the way he rolled his eyes but refrained from answering as a testament to his own awesome powers of self-control.

“There you were, all muscly he-man, and there she was, damsel in distress. You know you were her fantasy come true, right?”

“She was distressed and cold and needed to get off Four PDQ.”

“God, you miss the signals.” Gordon shifted as if to put his feet on the console, but at Virgil’s laser-like glare simply put one foot over his knee. It was obvious he was uncomfortable- Virgil saw his back when he changed into a dry uniform, and it already looked like a Picasso done with a hangover, and his fingers were red and raw as they tapped on his shin – but he had refused to lie down in back, so Virgil’s sympathy battled with annoyance. “You know, I’m bushed. We could have parked Two there at the research station, you and her could be sharing a hot cup of cocoa up here in the boudoir section of Two while you explained the 19th century Bauhaus movement to her in your manliest grunt. And I could be getting all kinds of zeds after tasting the 60 year old scotch that professor dude said he stashed next to the frozen whale meat. It could have been a night to remember. You just don’t think things through.”

“Firstly, Bauhaus was not 19th century.” Virgil ignored Gordon’s little snicker at his success in drawing that out. “And secondly, I do think things through. That’s why I don’t indulge my impulses.” Virgil checked his altimeter, adjusted his girl’s power rate a little. He glanced below at the gray-black sea, flecked with narrow lines of white that told of cresting breakers far beneath them. “For example, I haven’t hit the eject button and sent you jabbering away into the air at nine hundred feet. I would think you’d appreciate that.”

“Huh. Yeah, might have expected that kind of abuse.” Gordon wriggled on the seat as if he could settle into it deeper, despite the fact the seat’s construction wouldn’t allow anything of the sort. “Happens to truth tellers everywhere. Oppression. Threats of violence. Grunty lumberjack thugs oppressing people.”

“Truth?” Virgil had maintained a calm monotone in response to Gordon’s nonsense since they left, but this unmitigated bullshit required a spark of response. “Name one truthful thing you’ve said in the last thirty minutes.”

“Uh – that Gudrun had the hots for you?” The level of duh in his brother’s voice had blown past irritating right into the high smackability zone.

“Gordon, she was 65!”

“But well-preserved. It’s all that whale meat. Don’t be so ageist, bro. You’re an old man yourself, it’s a match made in senility heaven.”

“No one would convict me,” Virgil muttered. “I’d play back the flight recorder, and no one would convict me. Just – just sit there and give me some peace and quiet, would you?”

“Too tired. Cannot adult.” Gordon yawned extravagantly. ”Lack all ability to modulate verbal response. Default Obnoxious Mode fully engaged.”

A different tack. “You know, Gordo, you’re right. We should have stayed.” He gave his brother an artificially bright grin. “They had seal burgers they were going to cook for supper.”

“There, you see? We could be chowing down on seal burgers and scotch right now, you could be serenading Gudrun.” Moodily Gordon taped at his leg. Virgil waited, watching out of the corner of his eye without comment, and gradually a frown formed on Gordon’s face. “Wait a minute. No, wait. Seal burgers? I like seals. I don’t want to eat seals. Seals are fun. They’re awesome. That’s a lousy idea, Virgil.”

“Which is why we’re in descent and heading down to a particular castle in the north of Scotland to meet with Lady Penelope instead.”

He had no clear idea why Brains had sent through the message requesting the somewhat clandestine meeting, and he could sincerely wish for it to have come at another time. A barbecue on Tracy Island, the sounds of meat sizzling, gulls singing, and Gordon snoring mingling to create a soundtrack of success – that was all he wished for, right now. Still, Lady P was famous for her hospitality.

To say that Gordon had been fizzing like a faulty electrical wire ever since Brains had asked them to meet her would be an understatement.

He heard the chuckle even before he registered John’s avatar suddenly appearing above the console.

“You’ve been listening.”

“It’s definitely Gordon’s nap time. I don’t envy you.”

“Hey! I’m right here.”

Virgil grinned at John, complicit in big brother solidarity.

“Don’t remind me.”

“Thunderbird Two - I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings…”

Gordon sighed, dramatically. “Just tell us, John. It’s like ripping off a plaster. Better to do it quickly.”

“We have a situation. Three kilometres inland from the Newfoundland coast. I’m sending you the new course coordinates.”

“I’m not getting my barbecue any time today, am I?”

“Afraid not, Virgil.”

Obnoxious Gordon was gone. Instead he was leaning forward, his face already assuming the expression he wore when on a job, something older, a little harder, fully focused. John checked something on his sensors then looked up to meet their inquiring looks. He said, “I’m picking up what I think is the –“

And with a sudden shuddering jolt everything became quiet.

Gordon’s eyebrows, previously down in the little quarter frown he wore when concentrating, flew up in surprise.

“Virgil?”

It was at that precise second that Virgil felt the life leave his baby.

It was a tangible thing; only seconds before his ‘bird was a living creature, talking to him in her tics and rumbles, her flexing against the wind, the way she slid across the currents and eased her bulk through the sky, all power and confidence. Sometimes Virgil thought he was connected to her physically, the jet fuel flowing through his veins and into her. In this moment, when she fell silent, he felt as if his own heart had stopped along with her.

“Nothing.” He sat forward, quickly trying to reboot, checking every indicator his girl possessed. “John, we’ve lost power. We’ve got nothing.”

The space where John’s avatar had been looked worse than empty, as if the air itself had been scooped away with their brother, violently.

“Alright, alright.” Virgil spoke half to himself, half to his ‘bird. “Come on, girl. Something left for me.”

Thunderbird Two dropped.

He tried again, the restart, pulling from backup systems, banging the console. Part of his mind heard Gordon calling on his wrist device, International Rescue Five, International Rescue One, getting nothing. 

Nothing. He’d said it to John, and he’d said the truth. There was nothing under his hands or his feet but a corpse.

Everything happened so quickly that his conscious mind struggled to process it even as training kicked in. Thirty seconds beforehand they were readying themselves to fly to the rescue, in control, on target, prepared and professional and confident in their abilities to get the job done. 

Less than nine hundred feet above the sea now. No time for Gordon to get to Thunderbird Four. No time.

They were going down. Nine hundred feet at 32 seconds per second per second – that was ten seconds to impact. But something of a glide first, their forward velocity translating into an arc rather than a drop? Twenty seconds, max. At this height, falling this far, they were going to die. And all that filled Virgil’s mind was a memory of three year old Gordon, leaping into his almost-overwhelmed arms, crying out in fear, and his own body closing around him, keeping him safe. Keeping his little brother safe.

A muffled bang from the rear. That would be the engine going, its chemical heart needing the constant coolant to stop it from eating itself. Two’s hull would be breached. If they had power his control board would be lit up with red, the symbolic wounds of a dying girl.

“Oh, god. I’m sorry.” He looked at Gordon, white faced but silent in the co-pilot seat, still with a trace of belief in his eyes, and he watched as that hope, that certainty in his brother’s ability to do something miraculous, drained away. “I’m sorry, Gordon. Gords, I’m so sorry.”

Gordon swallowed. He breathed in deeply, nostrils flaring, a flicker of something dreadful in his eyes as realisation hit. Briefly, a precious second’s grace, he looked out at the gray skies that were discarding them. 

Then he did something that hurt more than Virgil thought anything ever could. He turned back to his brother and he smiled, a kind of sad sweetness in it, before shaking his head slightly.

“Nowhere else I wanna be, bro.”

It was unbearable. Impossible.

“Dammit, dammit. No.” Virgil lurched forward in his seat, ripped off the console casing with his bare hands, his mind racing. He needed an idea, because he just couldn’t sit here and wait as his baby killed them both.

Seconds only, and his hands moved before his brain caught up to what they were doing. Two lines from the emergency lighting system, xenon-difluoride battery to operate while Thunderbird Two was offline. Huge arc lights that flooded an emergency scene. Insanely powerful batteries.

Switching lines to the VTOL capacitor. Connecting. Reaching up to hit VTOL.

A judder through the body of his bird as the VTOL shocked itself into life for three seconds, one hundred and fifty feet above the waves. A mayfly life, a spark and gone, but their deadly descent had been denied.

Thunderbird Two dropped, but instead of x pounds of pressure, it was y, and the difference was existence itself.

In the three seconds as the VTOL fired she’d travelled to just under sixty feet above the sea’s surface. Virgil had time to shout, “Brace!” and begin to bend over into a crash ready position. He should have bent into it fully, but at the last millisecond his mind sent a jolt of alarm that somehow translated into his arm reaching forward to secure the casing panel he had wrenched free, the one that was now a deadly weapon in the imminent crash. 

He tried to make it back. From the corner of his eye he saw that Gordon was already braced, tucked down, arms clasped tight around his knees and hands covering the head that was turned towards him, his eyes huge in his face. Virgil’s body drew him back, trying to move faster than the twin forces of gravity and disaster, galloping like apocalyptic horsemen to meet him. He began to tuck his head down.

“Virgil!”

And then they hit, flat, and Virgil felt as though every bone in his body was driven into his spine even as it concertinaed into his skull. 

Nothingness.

Time slid from him. He couldn’t grasp the present. There was a kind of thundering in his mind, something huge that battered at his consciousness even as it took him away from any sense of self. There was only noise and a sensation of pressure. His eyes were open, and he saw what was happening, but it was if he was outside of it, watching events that had no reality, no meaning.

A huge wall of water flew up in front of the windshields and Thunderbird Two yawed backwards and forwards until the weight of the jets in her tail took her down, nose slightly tilted skywards as if to defy her fate even at the last.

No sense of self, but sense of someone else.

Gordon. 

Gordon was here. Gordon was in front of him.

Gordon was alive.

Gordon was babbling something, and it had as much reality as the gray water that covered the view where his sky should be.

“Virgil? Oh, wow, you hit your head bad, huh? Tuck it in, Virge, doesn’t just mean when you leave the john. Come on, Virgil, hey, look at me. Come on, focus here. I’m too pretty to be ignored.”

That voice, those large brown eyes. Something important. 

A click, a connection, a downward shift as if he’d dropped from another height back into his own body, and things mattered again. He was back in his ‘bird, and he hurt, and Gordon was pulling up his eyelids, peering at him.

“Hey, there you are. Wow, Virgil, some ride.” There was sweat on Gordon’s face, and he looked sick, but he was grinning. There would be life in Gordon until the universe turned on him for good and all, and Virgil reached towards it, gripping Gordon’s arms.

“Took – took a knock,” he managed.

“Yep, you sure did, looking out for me, you dope. Hit your hard old knees instead of hugging ‘em. Come on, we need to get you up and go.”

“Go?”

“Four,” and Gordon sounded so sure that Virgil made an effort to rise. The minute he did his stomach reported for emptying duty, and he reeled from Gordon to the bulkhead, holding on to it as he retched, his head thudding with each surge.

“Okay. It’s okay.” That was Gordon’s Soothing Voice, and that was not good. He needed to bring his A game here, because they may have pushed back one sortie but Death had a few more in his arsenal. He pulled himself semi-upright, took several breaths.

“Okay. M ’okay.”

“Yeah. You’re gorgeous.” Gordon pulled away from him, strode as fast as he could on the somewhat canted floor towards the back of the flight deck. “We gotta get my bird outta here Virge, before we hit sea bed. Water’s not deep around here, ‘bout 300 feet or so, but I don’t know what kind of power we’ll have, and it’s not likely we’ll be able to get much upward thrust.”

“Can’t – “ Damn, it was so hard to think, with a thousand hammers pounding in his head. “Can’t open module underwater.”

“We can, but we gotta get it clear. Thank god for Dad’s manual overrides. We can do this, but we gotta go now, Virge.”

“Coming.” Single words worked a whole lot better, and Virgil staggered across to where Gordon had opened a panel and pulled a lever before working a crank wheel that opened access to the module. He left it only wide enough to squeeze through, and Virgil followed.

A ladder, tight against the wall, in lieu of the lift that was almost certainly not working.

“She’s dragging us down. Gotta get this module free.” Gordon was all purpose, hurrying down to the floor level and then to Thunderbird Four before disappearing to the rear of it. Somewhere past the hammering in Virgil’s head lay another hurt, to hear of his baby as a traitor. She’d done the best she could to keep them alive, and even now he felt as though she was deliberately slow in her sinking. He dreaded to think of the size of the breach in her hull if she was sinking at all.

He fought to rally his thought processes. To get free they’d have to manually disconnect and rise upwards out of the module bay, the design point Scott had insisted upon in order to allow One to lift the pod should Two be incapacitated and on the ground. 

The manual override was over – there. He climbed down, slowly, haphazard care with each handhold because his vision was lying to him with every attempt to focus, and made his way across the gentle slope that felt more like a pitching deck in a force ten gale to his concussed balance. Reaching the wall allowed him one hand to bolster himself against the swinging spirit level in his mind while the other opened the panel that revealed the release mechanism.

“Leave that.” Somehow Gordon was back, with his diving helmet on his head and another one in his hand. He grabbed Virgil’s shoulders and gently took him from the panel to lower him onto the deck. “I got this. Just disconnected the module on the other side. Just hang tight for a sec.”

There was no argument Virgil could make without another round of stomach gymnastics, so he sat, breathing deeply, focusing on bringing his full consciousness back into play.

Release the module, fine. But the comparative weights of the module and the body of his bird weren’t so dissimilar that the module could break free, sink more slowly. Were they? The figures danced in his mind, a carousel of weights and displacement and water pressure. How far down were they, anyway?

“Won’t float,” he managed, and Gordon spared him a glance even as he pulled first one horizontal lever and then lifted up and locked a vertical one. A distinct clunk of sound, as the module was disconnected on this side, but no sense of lifting free. Then Gordon was crouched in front of him, and there was something like pity in his expression.

“We’re gonna have to flood Two’s flight deck. Get some more evenly distributed weight into her.”

Flood his girl? Her rear was already flooded. It shouldn’t matter, shouldn’t send such a sharp, hard hurt into his gut, but he couldn’t help it when he thought of the seat he had taken so many times, and Gordon reached for his shoulder again, squeezed it in unspoken sympathy. 

“Need your laser to drill a hole in her windshields. Need you to be ready to close the access door.”

Virgil worked his heels against the floor to scramble upright, Gordon stepping back to allow him, one hand still on his shoulder as a steadier.

“I can drill the hole.” It felt right, that he should be the one to take the final action to finish her, but Gordon shook his head.

“I need in and out real quick. You stand by the door, you close it when I come through. That water pressure is gonna to be intense.”

Without hesitation, Gordon reached up to unclip the laser on Virgil’s shoulder. The light through the access door was getting steadily dimmer as they sank deeper into the sea.

“When I get back in here I need you to wait until we clear Two then use the laser to open a hole in the module. Then you need to get to Four and close the hatches behind you. Get into the cockpit and sit tight. Have you got that?”

“Secure hatches. FAB, Gordon.”

“Have you got it, Virgil?” And there was Stern Gordon again, peering into his eyes, and something about his look and his tone pulled Virgil further up into full awareness.

“Yeah, I’ve got it, Gordo. What’s your plan?”

Gordon flexed and straightened his free hand, the only outward sign of his stress.

“Gotta wait for equalisation of pressure before I try to manually lower the ramp. We’ll be full of water before I can get back into Four. I’ll have to manually pump out the airlock, but that’s okay. In the cockpit I need you to divert power from the emergency battery. Should be 12,000 volts, but after that ice grind I was running a diagnostics check on the backup system before that thing hit us and I don’t know if anything got drained by that surge.”

It was so hard to follow the string of words that Gordon was unspooling to lie in a tangle about them. Virgil clung tight, did his best.

“FAB.”

Gordon nodded, crisply, before climbing back up the ladder and squeezing for the last time into the cockpit of Two. Virgil used the straps and struts on the walls to pull himself over to the base of the ladder. The manual override panel on the access door between the module and the cockpit was twelve feet above him beside the access door. Looking up brought his stomach to his mouth; he closed his eyes, breathed fast and shallow, then forced himself to grip each rung and climb in his little brother’s wake.

“Ready?”

He knew he reached top of the ladder when his hands grasped at air. Opening his eyes slowly, he brought himself higher to the point where he could stand on the thin lip alongside the access door.

The pain in his head was excruciating.

“Ready,” Virgil shouted – that was a shout, wasn’t it? An old man’s wheeze, but the best he could do, apparently. 

A flare of brilliance came through as Gordon used the laser on one windshield, and almost immediately there came a tremendous cracking sound. Water burst through, a torrent that knocked Gordon hard to the deck and gushed on through into the module. Virgil saw Gordon scramble back to his feet, the soles on his IR uniform giving him grip even as the water tore past his knees.

“Coming!” Gordon yelled, and Virgil gripped the crank. A second later Gordon’s hand appeared on the edge of the door and he pulled himself through. Virgil began winding, all his strength put into closing the door against the muscle of water pushing it aside.

Another few seconds and the water’s power would have been too much. But Virgil swung one more round out of the crank and the door clicked into closed, leaving a trail of water dispiritedly trickling down the join. All light was gone with the closing of the door, and Virgil felt quickly for the illumination from his dual light/ laser, grabbing at nothing as he realised Gordon held it. 

Gordon had thrown himself through the gap so heedless of anything else that he had ended up swinging out to dangle from the handrail of the ladder. Virgil heard him whoop. The light on his diving helmet bounced crazily across the space as he slipped and struggled to get his footing on the ladder. Looking up at Virgil, he suddenly laughed.

“And that’s how we do that.” He found his balance and promptly did the Navy approved ladder descent, feet on the outside of the rungs, hands guiding in one smooth drop, bouncing on his feet at the bottom. “Nice door work, Virge. I can see you moonlighting at night clubs from now on.”

“I doubt if your skinny arms would have had the grunt to get that done.” Virgil let go of the door and climbed down with deliberation to Gordon’s side, arms out a little when he left the railings to help his wayward balance.

Gordon tilted his head, listening. 

“Are we clearing, do you think?”

As if in answer, the module gave a jolt. Another bump, another, and the floor lurched beneath them, sending Virgil’s light shooting at crazy angles across the walls and deck.

“I think we’re getting there,” Virgil said. The thought of disconnecting from his girl, of leaving her to slowly die of wounds taken in battle together, brought a sense of numbness to his heart.

“Okay. So. Now you get to vandalise my module.” Gordon handed the laser back to Virgil then left him to sweep his hand in a circle at a point high up on the ramp and to the left of Thunderbird Four’s position. “Need you to burn a hole here so we can flood this and I can get the ramp down. Oh, wait.” He jogged back through the ankle high water to kneel by Four’s rails. “We need to release three of these. I’ll take out the fourth one when I’m coming back.”

“On it.” Virgil plodded to a locker on the wall and retrieved two wrenches. Gordon took one and they each began unlocking the clips that held Four in place on the launch frame before she powered up and slid down the ramp. Bending over brought a special kind of hell to the pounding behind Virgil’s eyes, but he ignored it and kept going, freeing first the front and then the rear clip. He used Four to help pull himself up.

“Gotta think we’re clear,” Gordon muttered, leaning one hand against the module’s wall as if to check its heartbeat.

Virgil swallowed his nausea, twice, before being able to speak. “This is your territory, Gordon. You know this stuff. Displacement of water, lift – I’m going with your call.”

Gordon cast an appreciative look his way, barely discernible in the darkness, before nodding. 

“The Atlantic current will take us north, and we don’t want that. Need to get easterly, get the current into the North Sea. The module will float faster than Two, so if we’re clear at all we shouldn’t drop back inside her even once we start filling up.” A ghost of a grin towards Virgil. “This is gonna be fun.”

Gordon, Vigil knew, liked his lies big and bold and unblushing.

“We need to work on your definitions,” Virgil said. The thought of deliberately filling the module with water wasn’t one that gave him any comfort, but sinking to lie trapped on the seabed was a particular horror. He hefted the laser onto his strap at his shoulder and stood to the side of the point Gordon had identified. 

“Here.” Gordon lifted the second diving helmet towards him. “In case you get caught before you get back into Four.”

Virgil accepted it, settled it on his head.

“Oh, and there are two survival packs by the exit hatch on Four. Toss ‘em inside when you get there.”

“Will do. You ready?”

“FAB.” Gordon took his place by the ramp deployment manual override. Virgil nodded, then turned and aimed towards the wall. The light from the laser was almost painfully bright, and did Virgil’s headache no good at all, but he stayed steady and followed a circular path until he had almost completed a full circle. He switched off the laser and braced himself again.

“Now?”

Gordon adjusted his hold on the override lever. “Go for it.”

A single burst from the laser, and the circular cut was complete. At once the circle of metal burst inwards, followed by a roar of water, dark and terrifying in the confined space.

“Go!” yelled Gordon, but Virgil had already turned and begun to stagger as fast as he could towards the back hatch on Thunderbird Four. The water smashed into the nose of Four and rocked her on the launch frame, but the final clip held. Virgil grabbed the edge of the back fin and swung himself around to the open airlock. Quickly he grabbed the survival packs and scrambled in, through to the second set of doors, and used the manual lever to close them behind him. Water surged against the glass as he stood there, breathing heavily.

He opened the access to the cockpit, and again closed it carefully. This would be their escape pod. His light showed him the cockpit controls, and outside, hanging on tight to a strut by the edge of the ramp, his brother, his yellow hair looking white against the darkness that surrounded them. The water was already to his waist.

It felt all kinds of wrong to be safe and sitting in a contoured seat while his brother clung to a strut in a rising swirl of arctic water, but Virgil knew there was no other way. And everything’s relative. The chance of either one of them dying remained high and equally likely, so, you know, they were playing nicely and sharing their game. 

He knelt by the control panel and pried it off. The circuits that appeared were not as familiar as those in his beloved ‘bird – and that brought another little jab of pain as he thought of them underwater – but he had acquainted himself with Thunderbird Four’s schematics on many occasions, and Brains tried to design the hardware of each Thunderbird along similar lines for just such eventualities as this. Virgil could see where Brains had tucked the fuel feed more tightly to the alternator than in Two, and where Four’s particular requirements were highlighted in a separate, easily identifiable section. He followed the power line back to where it diverged to the chemical reactor that gave Four its thrust, and looked beyond it for the backup battery. 

He rerouted the leads, and unconsciously clenched his jaw as he hit the start up. The screens flickered into life – more dull than usual, but just the sight of a powered console brought a fierce, “Yes!” under his breath. The celebration was brief; the power reading showed less than 200 volts.

“Oh, come on,” he muttered. Water rose above the level of his eye-line outside Four, surging against the forward port in ferocious swirls. He could no longer see Gordon, could only hope his grip held, that he was ready to deploy the ramp.

He switched off the console to conserve what little power they had, leaving the little cockpit lit only by the light on his helmet. His own breathing sounded loud and lonely, all noise from the violent incursion of the water in the module muffled inside Four’s watertight compartments. If he stopped to think about their predicament for too long the fear would rise as urgently as the water; Virgil knew about he had to rein in his thoughts, keep focused on each task as it presented itself. The hardest thing was that the task he had now was to wait, calmly, as Four shifted on the launch frame, as the module lurched and groaned and cracked with its flooding.

The water closed over the roof and his entrapment was complete.

“Come on, Gordon.” When your own voice is your sole comfort, best to make it sound brisk. He ignored his weakness, the absurdity of addressing the console as if it was his brother, and kept it light but firm. “Time to get your ass back in here.”

The thought of the water sucking Gordon’s legs from under him, of it disappearing him into the darkness beyond came to Virgil so suddenly that he gave a little gasp of inward breath. He peered forward, listening, aching to see or hear a sign that Gordon was still with him.

Another crack, and then muffled banging to the right. That had to be Gordon releasing the final clamp! He strained again to hear – there, the sound of the airlock, the rear hatch. Another long pause as the manual pump was engaged.

More bangs, and then the hatch behind him was cranked open and Gordon was there, water flying from him, his eyes wild. 

“Wow. That was awesome. I was awesome.”

“I acknowledge your awesome.”

“Move,” he said, and Virgil hastily did so, squeezing himself against the bulkhead beside Gordon’s seat. Gordon slid straight into command position, using his flashlight to check the rerouting, nodding his approval.

“You tried her?”

No point in sugar-coating it. “Less than two hundred volts.” 

“Shit. Okay. Seat’s there,” and Gordon pointed to his right where Virgil could just make out the release clamp for a small jump seat, even as Four tipped and slewed sideways under the pressure of the water. Fumbling, he pulled the seat down and strapped in.

“Got it open but couldn’t get the ramp locked. Must’ve been damaged when we dropped.” Gordon’s voice was terse but calm. He was switching on power, frowning at the voltage but continuing to work through pre-launch. “We need to get out of here fast before we hit seabed or Two. Shine your light forward.” Without another word he hit the impulsion drive button and Thunderbird Four started out.

They almost made it.

They’d had all kinds of luck since whatever felled them from the sky wrenched their lives off track, and most of it could safely be classed as bad. But this was the worst. As Four tried to clear the module their descent was finally stopped by Two almost directly beneath them hitting the seabed. The module, slightly further astern, crashed down into Two a second later and tipped forward into the empty module bay; and the ramp, unable to be secured, caught hard on Two’s upper frame and came slamming back upwards just as Four tried to slide past it.

There was a tremendous crash, then Four skewed off to starboard. Gordon gave it another burst of power and she surged forwards and upwards, almost as if she arched her back to avoid the touch of the ramp in a monstrous game of tag. He set her nose slightly upwards and then shut down her power again almost immediately, before scrambling from his seat to get through the hatch and see the damage. Virgil followed him, his heart thumping in his throat.

There was water streaming in through a crack across the top of the ‘bird, and although Virgil almost cried out when he saw it, Gordon didn’t let his expression change. He was bending down to retrieve the emergency repair kit similar to ones in the other Thunderbirds. It spread an instantly setting polymer across tears in metal, and it took Gordon less than a minute to seal the damage and head back for his command seat.

“Don’t wanna run diagnostics but we’ve got no choice.” Gordon busily worked at the console, closing down what he could, leaving the system running where he had to. “Hoo boy. We’ve lost starboard rudder control. That’s okay, that’s not too bad. I can just adjust, use the trim.” He scanned every indicator he could, calculating quickly, then closed down diagnostics so the only thing on the console showing any light at all was the proximity alarm and the power indicator, now flickering at one hundred and twenty volts.

“Minimum drive,” he muttered to himself. “No ballast control. We’ll be okay. Just take it easy, get her into the southern flow. It’ll be okay, Virgil.”

“Maybe we should just surface?” Virgil said, jamming himself once more onto the jump-seat. He liked to believe he was thinking strategically, but the truth was one he could acknowledge to himself; he hated this gluey darkness, the way scraps of dead things, live things, sediment and sea spawn floated into view and then past them, coming from even greater depths, silently. He hated this sense of thousands of tonnes of water over their heads.

But Gordon was shaking his head.

“This far north there’s too much disturbance up there. Thirty, forty foot waves, even ice coming down from the Arctic. It’s goo. We’re safer down below.” He spared Virgil a quick, sympathetic glance. “Not your thing, huh?”

“You could say that.”

“You’re doing good, Virge. We’ll make a submariner out of you yet.”

Virgil choked out a laugh. “I can’t say I see the appeal.”

“No.” Gordon looked back at the controls, frowning slightly. “Not the greatest of conditions, I’ll give you that.”

“It’s consistent.”

“True.” He brightened. “One day I’ll take you down along the Great Barrier Reef. What’s left of it. Or the Caribbean – now there’s some cool diving.”

That was the thing about Gordon, Virgil thought with sudden affection. He got down, same as the rest of them; but it was like pushing down a cork in a sink of water – the slightest release of pressure and it bobbed up again, past whatever the hell was trying to keep it below. Scott’s relentless determination was unrivalled, and John might as well have invented coolness in crisis. But for sheer buoyancy in the face of impenetrable odds, Virgil kind of thought he would choose Gordon to be at his side as he’d been so many times in the past. Whatever happens, we’ll die cheerful.

“How are we, really?”

“Really? Just gotta keep our eyes open – I’ve set the proximity scanner to minimum to conserve energy, we get about five metres warning. And we just gotta head south. There’s land down there, we weren’t that far out from the Orkneys. So long as we keep going south, get out of the drift towards the north, we’ll do fine.” Again Gordon worked to find the balance. He flicked a quick look towards Virgil, and there was something reluctant in his face. “So, uh – that thing that happened?” He shifted his gaze away to stare straight ahead, although there didn’t seem to be anything to look for, and Virgil had the distinct sense he didn’t want to look at his brother just now. “The whole ‘look, no engine’ thing? Not denying it was fun and all but - what do you think it was?”

Virgil had been avoiding that question in their rush for survival. Now he found himself staring into the abyssal darkness alongside his brother, as if the answer was going to magically loom forward into the relative brightness of his sash light.

“I don’t know. But to get that kind of effect – my guess is a modified EMF, an electromagnetic flux.”

“Huh.” Gordon carefully adjusted the trim with the tiniest burst of power. They were travelling so slowly that a large piece of seaweed drifted onto the clear Perspex of Thunderbird Four’s nose and hung there, trapped with the pressure of the water ahead of them. “So do you think we were targeted?”

“Someone fired an EMF at us?” Virgil tensed his jaw. “I hope so.”

“What?” Gordon was startled enough to turn towards him, leaving the mesmeric display of tiny sea life unobserved. “Why would you say that?”

Virgil shrugged slightly. “The alternative is worse. A solar flare, passing through the earth, knocking out every plane, every computer, every piece of electrical equipment on the planet. Everything, Gordon.”

“Scott!” Gordon breathed. Virgil nodded, grimly.

“Scotty, John. I know we’re designed to be solar flare-proof, but that’s always a shifting parameter, always dependent on just what gets sent our way. Given how Two was affected, they could both be down. John has backup, and his survival suit. He wouldn’t suffocate. But without power, if the station loses height and gathers momentum towards Earth…”

“God, Virgil, no!”

“And you know how many planes are in the sky at any one time? How many passengers? What about people in hospitals, or in surgery when it struck.”

“I can’t even – hell, it would be a catastrophe.”

“Yeah.” He found himself shaking his head slowly. “I gotta believe this was just a deliberate attack on us alone.”

“Huh. How weird is that? Hoping you’ve been shot down on purpose.” Gordon gave him a sudden tight grin. “You know what? I can buy that. We Tracys have a gift for attracting loonies. My bet’s on a lone gunman with the hots for The Hood.”

“Always thinking positively, right?” He returned the smile.

“You bet. Can you imagine his face when we pop up in Four and say, ‘Surprise, sucker!’ from behind him?”

“Something to look forward to,” Virgil agreed, wearily. He leant his head back against the bulkhead and closed his eyes briefly. The sense of movement in Four was so different to his own ‘bird, a constant, almost unnoticeable rise and fall with the current, the occasional list left or right that Gordon kept adjusting for, subtle movements of his eyes and hands the only indicator that he was actually working constantly to keep them upright and facing in the right direction. The motion was gentle, but enough to prod his already queasy stomach into further protest. Closing his eyes helped. 

He kept them closed, kept the strident thumping in his head as background noise, nothing more. He focused on his breathing, on holding back the nightmare visions of Scott and John plummeting to their deaths out of his inner eye’s view.  
He could have sworn that he closed his eyes for a few minutes only. But when he opened them again, he was propped up with a life preserver placed between his shoulder and the bulkhead, supporting his head. Quickly he glanced at his watch, and to his amazement found that five hours had passed.

Gordon was still at the controls, still peering forward. But Virgil noted with sudden concern that his eyes had become glazed, that starey-eyed look that came to pilots who had fought too long to keep their bird in flight when endless skies and artful winds conspired to bring her down. He was still feeling for their balance in the water, still eking out every flicker of power.

“Gordon.” Virgil’s voice was croaky; he cleared his throat. “Hey, buddy, you should have woken me.”

Gordon blinked several times as if recalibrating his awareness before glancing towards him. 

“Oh. Hey. You’re awake.” He returned to staring into the blackness. “I poked you a few times. You told me to get lost. Figured that was as good a concussion test as any.”

“Does patient express annoyance with Gordon?” Virgil managed a chuckle. “Yeah, I guess that works.” He made an effort to sit upright and dropped the preserver to the floor. “So do you know where we are?”

Gordon did what he always did when excited or nervous; he danced in place. First he touched the controls in front of him, hummingbird –light movements as his eyes twitched from one gauge to another, before he reached up to toggle something above his head – and then began the whole round of touching again.

“I dunno. Not sure. How far did we travel once we decided to do it vertically?”

“I couldn’t tell you. Was kinda busy at the time.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. Kinda busy.” Around he went again, touching, tapping, constant movement in a way that Virgil knew was fundamentally unnecessary. And he knew something else, after so many years of growing and playing and working beside his brother; he knew the signs.

Gordon Cooper Tracy was running on the hard edge of nothing left.

“You don’t think we’ll make it.”

A flinch, and there really wasn’t any kind of satisfaction in calling such a spectacularly incompetent bluff.

“No, we’ll make it. We’ll make it.” Gordon refused to look at him. “I’m just not sure what we’ll be making. There’s no land until the Orkneys. We could have tried for a more desolate tract of water but I don’t think we’d have nailed it.”

“How far?” Virgil put one hand on Gordon’s arm, anchoring him. “I need some numbers to work. How far to land, hypothetically?”

“I don’t know.” Gordon waved a hand at the console. “I could use the satnav, but that would drain the last power we’ve got, and we need that for surfacing. It’s been hard to keep track of our progress – I mean, I should have a handle on it, but…”

“Best guess?”

“I don’t know!” Frustration and anger, sure, maybe impatience with Virgil, but underneath it all the tom toms of fear, building. “I should be able to reckon it close, but there’s no current and we’re barely doing 0.3 knots. I can’t be sure of our starting point. Best guess? We’re still a hundred klicks or more from the Orkneys, in the middle of nothing.”

“Okay.” Virgil made his voice as non-committal as he could. “So we just keep doing what we’re doing until we get as close as we can. Right?”

Gordon said nothing, his face set.

“I mean,” Virgil continued, “We’ve got supplies. Air, right? We just need to stay calm and ride along. Right?”

“Sure. Yeah, I know.“ Gordon cut himself off. He bit his lip, eyes ceaselessly scanning the ever-circling murk that was their world now. “Anyway, nothing for you to worry about. I’ve got this.”

Right. A child dismissing a tornado might be less convincing, but not by much.

Virgil’s heart began its own backbeat of fear, but seeing his little brother like this kept his voice strong and calm.

“I get it. So – all that stuff in the module, that was just to fuck with me?”

Gordon gave him a glare, made more impressive by the deep shadow that captured half his face.

“What are you raving about?”

“You saved my life, you saved your life, you got us this far but now you’re thinking we may as well have sat it out in Two?”

“No, of course not.” He paused, worked the instruments again, and Virgil could almost see the effort it took to reclaim that neutral expression. “I’m just going through our options. Just not exactly sure what the best thing to do is here.”

“Okay. That happens.” Virgil unclipped his seatbelt in preparation for standing up. The thought of that action brought him no joy whatsoever. “Mostly when we’re so tired we can’t think. Gordon, you’re exhausted. Why don’t we set Four down for a bit, get some rest, come at it again in a few hours?”

Gordon shook his head, his hands busily working to keep Four’s nose up and straight.

“Can’t set her down, don’t know that we’d have the power to get back up again. We’re riding between the currents just now. I’m reckoning on feel, pretty much. She’s giving me nothing – I gotta do everything. We’ve got to find that easterly drift, take us into the North Sea. We head north again – we’re not gonna make it. I can’t rest.”

“Then neither do I. You need to eat and rehydrate. And then I am going to tell you all about the Bauhaus movement of the 20th century and its influence on architecture. After that we’ll visit the Freestyle Furies movement of the 2040s, and then the art-deco masters of the 1920s. At which point you’ll have found the North Sea and we’ll have a chance to find some kind of land, somewhere. Okay?”

Gordon stared at him set-faced for a minute, then he shook his head.

“You’re seriously weird, you know that?” He turned back to the monotonous view, but there was something in the corner of his mouth, the crinkle of his eyes, that told Virgil he had found his balance again.

“Says the man with the squid tattoo.”

Taking a deep breath, Virgil forced himself to stand. Immediately his back and neck seized, and he gasped a futile protest against the fact that his body had been pretzeled at high pressure all too recently without any kind of care since.

“Virge?”

“I’m good. Supply run. Think happy thoughts while I’m gone.”

“Ha.” Gordon gave him the merest hint of a smile. “Scott in drag. John at a pop concert. Alan with a flat tire. You in the great flannel drought, 2063.”

Damn, he felt like an old man, unable to straighten, thighs trembling, his head splitting in two as he shuffled into the rear. The supplies were in the overhead locker, he knew, but as he reached for them his back spasmed and he bit into his fist to stop from yelling out loud.

Pain, so much pain, and he would have whimpered had he been alone.

This was bullshit. Gordon was running on his second adrenalin crash following the rescue then the attack, and all Virgil had done was bang his head slightly, right? Time to suck on some concrete and toughen the fuck up.

He reached up again, and this time the cry was torn from him.

“Virgil? You okay?”

Words were somewhere floating around in that darkness outside. He managed an “Mm-mm” as he closed his eyes and swore, softly, violently, against the rending of his body from inside.

No good. The lockers were out of reach. Staying in his half crouch he reached into one of the survival packs and rummaged until he found two protein bars and two bottles of water.

Then the agonising trip of five feet back into the cockpit to lower onto the jump-seat and wait for his muscles to stop screaming.

“Mmm, dead donkey, my favourite. Thanks, bro.” Gordon took a bar from him and began busily chewing, his eyes back to staring at the blackness beyond their tiny bubble of light, hands keeping to their intricate pattern that meant Four stayed steady. “So – Virgil Grissom Tracy’s tour of the art world?”

“Right. Yeah.” Breathe through the pain, relax muscles twisted into knots, and summon up words to keep your brother awake in the face of exhaustion and the abyss. “So, Bauhaus…”

Another endless hour went by, Virgil’s voice getting hoarse as he trawled through his considerable knowledge of art history, occasionally leavened by incorrect pop references to keep Gordon awake.

“Kosimoto redefined the use of colour and texture with his Freestyle Fury work in Kobe. Of course, that’s when it was revealed Kylo Ren was in fact the long-lost grandmother of Jia’Lam.”

No response from Gordon, and Virgil looked up, carefully.

“Gords?”

“Shhh.”

Virgil’s eyebrows raised. He couldn’t recall the last time it was Gordon telling him to be quiet. But Gordon’s head was tilted slightly, his eyes inward-looking, intent. 

Four gave a minor tilt as if matching Gordon’s head position, then bumped, slightly, as if she’d come up against a feather pillow. And then she dipped hard, sideways, Gordon wrestling the controls, bringing her back up as she sidled like a nervous horse, the motion getting worse until Virgil had to grab on to the bulkhead to stop from splaying into his brother.

“Easy girl, easy babe. It’s okay, I got you.” And Gordon was laughing, even as he worked, a sound so hollow with exhaustion that Virgil winced to hear it. “There’s the current. We’re heading south, into the North Sea.” After a long minute of sickening see-sawing, Four settled, and Gordon slumped back, his breath leaving him in a whoosh.

“Okay. That’s it. That’s it.” He reached up to adjust something Virgil couldn’t see but knew to be the ballast control. “We just need to keep going south now. Virge, our ride’s arrived.” 

A ride into darkness, 300 feet down in a dying sub, with an exhausted pilot and a crippled passenger. But something about that had Gordon grinning again, and for the moment, that was enough to bring the merest wisp of hope back into Virgil’s heart.


	2. Monsters

Chapter 2

Monsters

It was called the goo test.

Being ‘in the goo’ was USN slang for being unable to see the earth or the horizon and hence reliant on instruments. It was not a good place to be.

The goo test was the single greatest cause of washout in WASP, the one thing that each cadet dreaded during their six months’ Boot Camp. Nobody knew what the goo test comprised, but everyone had horror stories helpfully hinted at during down time with senior officers.

Of course it was implemented at the worst possible time. A hard day in school followed by an unscheduled 15 kilometre night hike left Gordon and the other cadets collapsing into bed at 0100 hours. An hour later and they were rudely woken, blindfolded, and marched to the largest artificial water tank on the planet, known to the rest of the world as the Wasp Underwater Training Facility and to the personnel at San Diego WASP base as The Puddle – or, sometimes, as What The Fuck.

Ordinarily The Puddle’s massive size held few fears for those who were desperate to get into the submarine based security force. Anyone with issues around water was not likely to be fronting up for selection in the first place. But on this night The Puddle had been thoroughly transformed.

Chief Petty Officer Shan bellowed at the cadets as they huddled by the tank’s massive wall.

“Cadets, this is the goo test. Those of you who pass this test tonight will shortly be invited to take your place amongst WASPs serving force. Those of you who do not pass – and some of you will meet that criteria – will be escorted from the base immediately upon the end of the testing process, if you are capable of walking. Anyone who does not survive the goo test will be mourned appropriately as a waster of WASP time and effort.”

Gordon grinned, and promptly hid the fact. He appreciated a good dose of snark amongst the orders, but grinning cadets were not reciprocally appreciated by CPOs intending on scaring their charges.

One by one the cadets were taken aside, still blindfolded, and instructed to get into a wetsuit and put on full diving gear, with scuba. Then each one was escorted up steps to where multiple sliding tunnels were suspended above the water. The tunnels twisted and turned and then opened out to allow each cadet to drop ten feet into the darkened tank, and each one was dropped at a different point across the tank. None of this was readily understood by the cadets at the time. All they knew was darkness, a climb, and then a PO instructing them, in a quiet, cold voice more frightening than Shan’s yelling, exactly what their task entailed.

“You will enter the slide and find the water. If you remove the blindfold prior to entering the water you will be regarded as having failed the test. When you are submersed in the water you may remove the blindfold. You will then find the centre of the tank and collect a marker with your designation on it. On retrieval of that marker you will swim to the exit point. The exit point is at 320 degrees north. You will complete this task in one hour. If at any point you rise to the surface and raise your hand for rescue, you will be regarded as having failed the test. If you take longer than one hour, you will be regarded as having failed the test. If you drown, you will be regarded as having failed the test and annoyed the Chief.”

With that, Gordon was hoisted up into a wet tunnel. He slipped and slithered forward, his arms outstretched, feeling for the edge. His overwhelming emotion was one of bemusement; the test sounded ridiculously easy. What he didn’t know was that his superiors were watching everything through infra-red cameras both in the tunnels and throughout the tanks, and those superiors took great delight in first opening the tunnels unexpectedly to drop yelping cadets into the water when they least expected it, and then in manoeuvring via remote control the huge Perspex barriers placed throughout the tank at just such a point and time that they would thwart almost every effort to complete the task in the utterly darkened tank.

What his superiors didn’t know was that Gordon couldn’t get lost.

It wasn’t something that he really ever noticed. Compasses were a puzzle to him; people stopping to consult a compass in a hike through the woods was as odd to him as someone opening a floor plan to navigate through their own house. When he encountered people uncertain as to direction he always put it down to momentary bamboozlement or lack of concentration. The thought that his ability to always, always sense north and therefore know where he was at any given time or in any situation was, in fact, freakish, never occurred to him.

So, once he dropped into the water with a surprised squeal (he tried very hard to remain heroically silent but the sensation of the tunnel disappearing beneath him suddenly was pretty darn squeal-worthy), and given that his ultimate direction was just off north, his only issue was in finding a starting point in order to work towards the centre.

The fact the water was pitch black stymied him for a few seconds, but then he chose a direction – east, for Kansas – and took it confidently. As it happened, this was a lucky choice; he was one of five dropped closer to the eastern side of the tank, so he reached the retaining wall relatively quickly. 

At which point he turned left and swam northwards along it. Occasionally he would bump into an invisible barrier, one that extended far enough across his path that it forced him to swim inwards, away from the wall and then back along the way he had come. But eventually he reached the end of the barrier, rounded it, unerringly returned to the wall and kept going.

Once he reached the corner he simply made a beeline diagonally across the tank, knowing he would reach the centre inevitably on that axis. The barriers kept being swung into his path and he simply skirted each of them, finding his way back to his intended path in the complete darkness as if following a neon lit highway.

After several minutes he saw a faint glow ahead and realised it was an aquatic canister lit with the tiny lamps used on the side of the WASP scuba gear. He opened it, rummaged about and found a small marker with his service number on it. By now he figured his superior officers were watching everything closely, so he gave a double thumbs up and a sketchy salute for the benefit of the viewing audience and then headed directly north.

The whole thing was over in 28 minutes. He reached the northern wall, turned left again to find another faintly lit marker that indicated ‘exit here’ and swam upwards. It was so dark he couldn’t tell if anyone was above him or not, so he gave a cheerful, “Honey, I’m home” as he broke the surface, expecting and getting a pair of hands each side to haul him from the water.

What he didn’t expect was an immediate arrest.

“Come with me, cadet,” someone hissed in his ear, and then those same pairs of hands frogmarched him down from the platform and outside the building, straight over to the administration block to where he was unceremoniously dumped outside the CO’s office.

The goo test. Huh.

Man, he hadn’t thought of that in an age.

Made all kinds of sense to do it now, though, if anything made sense to him right now.

This was the real goo test. 

Visibility was almost exactly zero, for practical purposes. Virgil’s light and the forward beams on the lowest possible strength pierced the darkness for about two metres. Worthless, if they were going any kind of speed, but as they were coasting on the current, and that was only – whoa, picked up some since heading south, huh. From barely moving they were now at 3 knots and rising. Still walking pace, dawdling, and he knew he had some acute decisions to make in the next half hour and that he was in no kind of shape to be making them.

Old timers, the real old submariners in the combat submersibles from the wars of the 2030s and 40s, spoke of long hours underwater and how they’d get a little crazy staring out the portals into the fathomless deep, straining to see what their instruments had already told them wasn’t there.

Jasmin Khemlani, the instructor at WASP that he liked best, used to talk about staring into nothing and seeing shapes rising up from the seabed – horses, elephants, monsters, all created by swirls of sand and debris and current that existed in the depths of the oceans. He’d always struggled to imagine it. And even when living underwater for a year, he’d never experienced anything like the ‘deep sea bonkers’ Parker was always threatening him with.

Until now.

Now, he was working his ‘bird six times a minute, seven, eight if they hit some kind of flow; gimbal, trim, ballast control, power, trim, ballast control, power, and round again – just to keep her steady-keeled and heading horizontally. He was using every ounce of skill and every scrap of knowledge he had to keep them viable in the water. He knew he’d blown past the operating limits of his own mind, way beyond the red zone that any good mariner knew to heed as holy writ. Thou shalt not keep going when exhaustion was eight hours ago.

He knew it, because he was seeing things.

A giant squid had unfurled its massive tentacles at them just minutes ago. Good old Four just puttered through one of the suckered limbs, as good old Gordon felt his muscles tense, again, to fight the threat that, again, didn’t exist; as the enemy that did drained yet more cognisance from him.

He was seeing things everywhere.

No point in telling Virgil. His big brother didn’t know the meaning of quit, so he had spent an hour busily babbling about – what, Christ, art history? Gordon hated any kind of history, boring, stuff that was dead and gone and done. Art history was a special kind of torment, and he could only think Virgil was planning to annoy him into alertness.

Maybe that was fair enough. Returning the favour.

Virgil was undoubtedly concussed. What he wouldn’t admit, of course, was that he was also utterly exhausted on top of it. Only his big brother could battle for five hours to keep a plane and a building stable in a Force 8 gale, concentrating more fiercely than a chess-master, physically fighting the controls, and think of it as ‘sitting it out’. When he’d come up in the lift of Two (don’t think of Two, not now) after clearing the research station, Gordon had seen at once that Virgil had wound himself up into a cumulus cloud of tension, all because he’d been above the immediate rescue and Gordon had been down in it.

Playing the brat card was the easiest way he knew to help Virgil unclench and Release The Grump, and that was the best way he knew of helping Virgil find his equilibrium again.

So Virgil had returned that with interest. 

Not now, though. Not for the last – how many hours? Gordon glanced at the on-board clock again, but the numbers were so softly lit and blurred he couldn’t read them properly. Maybe five? Was it really five hours since Virgil had stopped talking? He was kind of awake, maybe, staring out in a daze at times, closing his eyes at others. 

Gordon's stomach was telling him it was a long time, anyway. What he wouldn’t give for another protein bar, another bottle of water. But he couldn’t leave the controls, not for a second, and Virgil wasn’t with him enough to hand over.

As if to prove him wrong, his brother chose that moment to stir and lift this head, groaning.

“Gordon? How about I take my turn at the wheel?”

The thought was a cruel joke. Maybe they were both exhausted, but Virgil was injured, too, and even on his best day, Virgil would struggle to bring the boat along in the way Gordon was doing it now; using the current, sparing the instruments, eking every bit of power out of her.

“I dunno, Virgil. She’s not like your bird. Takes a delicate sense of control to keep her happy.”

Virgil grunted, then hooked his thumb.

“Shift. Go get some sleep. I can manage here for a while. You’re beat, Gordon, and it’s way past balls thirty.” He gave him a proud smile. “And we’re in the North Sea.”

“I don’t know where, but yes, we’re heading that way.” Gordon worked the controls, worked the controls, an automaton running out of steam. He blinked as a phantom whale spawned and dissipated in front of him, then cleared his throat to cover his sudden start. “What do you think of using some power to check bearings, see where we are?”

Virgil opened his hands.

“She’s your ‘bird, Gordon. What do you think?”

Gordon bit his lip, an old habit from when he was a child and concentrating on an impossible math problem. 

“I say we go for it. It won’t use much, and now that we’re not heading for Santa’s workshop, we can spare a little.” He tapped at the controls briefly, and the sonar came on. Virgil leaned forward to look at it alongside his little brother.

“Whoa – what’s that?”

A multitude of small dots, but beyond that, a larger shape sitting in the top right hand corner.

“That, Virgil,” Gordon muttered, tracking his eyes from the sonar to the proximity screen, “is some kind of land. But those small dots, they’re not good news.”

“Underwater rock formations?”

“Oh, look at that. He did pay attention in training.” Frowning, focused, Gordon peered forward, their feeble light doing little to show their way. “But in one way, that clears up a decision I was gonna have to make.”

Virgil shifted, obviously hurting, just as obviously trying to hide the fact.

Gordon shot his eye sideways to gauge the response. “I think we might have to go up top.”

A kind of light came into Virgil’s tired eyes.

“Say it ain’t so.”

“Please. Try to put a lid on that enthusiasm.” Gordon tensed and squeezed his shoulders briefly, trying to ward off cramp. “Yeah, yeah, I know that thought makes your day, but it doesn’t make mine. We’ll have less control, you’ll probably throw up, and it will take twice as long to get to where we need to be going south.”

“But you could get some rest.”

“There is that. And the current is all due south here. Four will float with just using minimal power to correct trim in the case of big waves.”

Virgil reached forward to tap at the sonar screen, then winced as muscles pulled in his back.

“What about that land? That’s not far.”

Gordon leant forward to slap his hand off the screen.

“Nope. ‘Bout three point six klicks. But there’s nothing big near here, so it’s gonna be just some dumbass empty rock, and look at all those baby rocks around it, look at the current patterns here.” He tapped another screen. “That’s the aquatic equivalent of that Hadron Collider Brains liked so much. Be like taking my girl into a blender. Drunk.”

Virgil made a kind of huffing noise.

“Can’t we just - ?”

“No. Seriously, no. We’re better to get past this collection of – “

The proximity alarm sounded.

Two metres’ worth of warning.

“Shit!” Gordon slammed back into the seat and swung hard at the controls. The pinnacle that appeared out of nowhere disappeared as they dipped left, and then they were swerving between two others rising implacably from the seafloor, Four as responsive as ever, tipping and diving to avoid the deadly rocks. He was burning up power as he kicked her through, but the current between each pile was fierce and the fight was immediate. The proximity alarm kept blaring, and Four ducked another hazard to the right.  
“Hold on,” Gordon gritted out, every ounce of focus he could summon coming in to feeling every one of his boat’s heartbeats, every one of her twists and dips. Still the alarm kept beeping at him, high pitched and urgent, but the light showed nothing and his eyes strained helplessly into the darkness. In the corner of his view he saw Virgil’s hand on the overhead strut, bracing against the manoeuvres. 

Virgil asked, “Can you see -?”

And there, right there, a monster of the deep, jaws wide, teeth massive, huge enough to swallow Four whole.

A mind trick, he knew that, a phantom of his exhaustion and strain, but his hand convulsively tightened on the controls and they swerved away from nothing, straight into another deadly column of rock.

At the last second he sent a surge of power into her, trying to climb above, but it was too late. There was the sound of metal crunching into something hard, horrifically loud and reverberating through the hull.

More scraping and tearing, a nerve shredding sound terrifying in the darkness. 

“No, no!”

Gordon busily began switching power to reverse thrusters and toggling the rudder, trying to find lift, but Four was wedged solid. No, not wedged; she was impaled, and he felt is as if it were through his own flesh.

“Dammit!” He worked frantically, the power so carefully husbanded useless now and carelessly expended in a flurry of flicked switches and pulled levers. Nothing helped. Four’s engines pulsed in a final paroxysm of resistance and then they, too, died.

The quiet was devastating. And not complete. There was sound from the rear compartment that was the dread of every submariner.

Gordon gradually pulled his hands free of the controls. His fingers flexed helplessly. The sensation of guilt was so overwhelming that for a long, useless moment he couldn’t even look at Virgil.

“Gordon?”

But it was impossible to deny a man sitting so close to you his leg brushed yours, and especially not one who had faced death with you already in this impossible day.

“Sorry, bro. I fucked up. We’re stuck. I think - I think this is the end of the line.”

Virgil slowly took one hand off the strut and brought it down to his other to grip them together on his knees.

“What are you saying?”

Gordon swallowed, fighting his immediate desire to go and look at what he knew was happening in the rear compartment. There really wasn’t any need for hurry. Four was doomed. But Virgil needed a calmness from him that he was struggling to find.

“Virgil, okay, listen to me. We’re just 60 metres down here. This is okay. We’ll just make our way up top, nice and easy, and head for land. We’ve got breathing gear, helmets, it’ll be okay.”

“You just said –“

“Forget that, okay? That was for Four, that was when we had options.”

“Okay.” If Virgil’s expression was anything to go by, he was struggling to find his calm, too.

Gordon got up, ignoring the persistent drum of pain from the bruising encounter with ice and research station, and pushed into the rear compartment. The split from earlier that night was opened again, as the base of the sub took the stress of impact and transferred it up through the roof to the weakest point. The mend was meant to last a trip home, not to withstand collisions.

Water spurted downwards. Already there was foot of it in the compartment.

Focus. Focus. Virgil needs you. Four is gone.

“Not for good, baby,” he said, softly, reaching up to touch her hull, a reverent goodbye before Virgil came in. “I’ll be back for you.”

“So,” and Virgil was behind him, still obviously struggling to straighten his shoulders. “You said 3.6 kilometres?”

“And you know I do 10 ks each morning. Piece of cake.”

Not in these conditions, though. Not when exhausted and injured and against currents and waves. Not dragging my concussed brother behind me.

Virgil nodded, swallowed. “So… we need diving helmets, scuba gear?”

“Yep.” Gordon reached up for the spare breathing apparatus in the overhead locker, and expertly lifted it over Virgil’s head. “There you go. Now put on this – that’s your buoyancy compensator, right? Tighten it around the belt – here. These are your weights. Still got your helmet? Great. You’re all set. Once we’re in the water, I’ll help adjust that buoyancy for you, get some positive buoyancy happening. Oh, one more thing –we’ll use a diving line. You’ll be connected to me, on a four metre line.”

“Got it.”

“Aaaand – sorry, bro, you’ll need to lose your boots.”

“My boots?” Now that was a mournful look; but, sighing, and using one hand to steady himself against the hull, Virgil bent to ease off his size 13s. He wobbled alarmingly as he straightened up, and Gordon reached for his arm to steady him.

“Wait, here.” Gordon grabbed two water bottles, gave one to Virgil. “Drink this. I doubt if we’re properly hydrated just now, and we need to be before diving.”

Seawater continued to pour in.

“Now, decompression rates. We’re at 60 metres, so, uh…” Damn, but it was hard to do math when his brain was so fried it should have a slice of bacon on top. “Right. Ascending rates, got it. We’ll stay down here for five minutes while I get you sorted, then ascend until we hit 40 metres, then we’ll stop for two minutes. Then up to 30 for two minutes, then 20, then 10. At ten we’ll have longer intervals, first one about five minutes, then go up another two meters for ten, then another two at ten. We’ll sit at four metres for about 20 minutes. It’ll take about an hour all up.”

“Okay.” Virgil picked up one of the survival bags. ‘We’re taking these?”

“You bet.” Gordon hefted one. “Just follow my light, Virge. Can’t lose you, ‘cos you’re attached. So just concentrate on keeping behind me, keeping with me, okay?”

“That I can just about manage.” Virgil sloshed over to the rear hatch, everything in his body language signalling his determination not to admit just how utterly unhappy he was about where they were and what they were doing.

Gordon gave a slight shake of his head. He felt a sudden flood of love for his big brother, the guy who had not said one word about the way he, Gordon, had managed to screw this up so spectacularly. All he had to do was steer clear of a bunch of rocks. One job. And now, instead, his brother was geared up to go out into a hostile environment, injured, exhausted, at risk again because his stupid little brother couldn’t keep his goddam mind together. Deep sea bonkers. Right.

And now Virgil was standing by the hatch, head up, faint smile on his face, trying so hard to look as if the thought of heading out into that black, swirling cold was no big deal, just what he would have suggested himself if he’d gotten around to it.

It broke Gordon’s heart.

As he joined Virgil at the hatch, his brother reached out and grabbed his arm.

“Gordo?”

And because he was a master at translating Virgil speak, he knew exactly what was being said.

Make sure we do this right. Make sure you keep yourself safe. 

Promise this won’t be the last time we see each other.

So from somewhere, just for him, Gordon found one of his best, sunniest smiles.

“I’d say bazunga!, but I know how you like to save that for when you’re romancing the ladies. Wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.”

Virgil rolled his eyes.

“Just open that hatch, Gordon.”

Gordon gave him his crispest salute, still grinning, and did just that.

They were going in the water. And the water was both the best thing in Gordon’s life, and the worst.

The best thing in his life was that moment when he was suspended naked in prelapsarian glory far above the reef and just let his body disappear into the blue. That was when he wondered if he could just disperse the atoms of his humanity into a stream that would take them out, out into the wildness, to embrace the beauty and life he saw all around him.

The worst was bitter, and black, and dragging a broken body to death and complete obliteration, lost to the sun forever, one thousand cold fathoms down.

And right now, the thought of sun and freedom was so far away he couldn’t remember them.

But he could hold onto this; Virgil clasping his arm, giving him a nod, as he manually opened the rear hatch and let the darkness roaring in.

He swung himself out into it, clearing the line so that Virgil could more tentatively join him. Once they were both free of Four he found his neutral buoyancy by releasing a little of the gas embedded in the compartments of his uniform. Then he reached to adjust Virgil’s, so that his brother could maintain the right angle as they gradually ascended. Once he’d adjusted the buoyancy compensator on Virgil’s suit, he gave Virgil a thumb’s up and then waited.

He checked the time on his watch, and after five minutes, he tapped Virgil and headed off.

The line between them drew taut and then slackened as Virgil left Four behind and worked to swim as close as he could to Gordon. 

Vision was minimal. Virgil’s laser light was shining behind him, but it was hardly a constant one, as Virgil battled to find a stroke that would allow him to work with the current. His brother’s swimming style was dogged, at best, and Gordon felt the line pull and release as Virgil struggled.

In the crushing blackness of sixty metres down, Gordon followed the invisible line that drew him unerringly towards their goal. The current here was sweeping them alongside the land, so he angled his body, working by degrees across it even as he slowly gained height. The survival bag swung from where he had attached it to his sash, and Virgil kept jerking on the dive line, but despite these impediments he began to find that rhythm that seemed as natural to him as breathing, his body welcoming the sense of ease that water always brought him.

All the dangers of the deep were arrayed against them, and added to that was their physical and mental states, both worn down to near bedrock by fear and grief, uncertainty and exhaustion. But this? Bringing his brother to light and air and land? That he could do, that he would do, if it cost him the last of whatever was left.


	3. To Live Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've finally got these boys to where I wanted, and it's only taken me 13,000 odd (very odd) words. Really? Oh well. Let the marooned boys fic begin.

To live again

He woke with the sensation of something biting on his fingers.

The feeling was so real and so strong that he tried to swat away whatever was chewing on him. His hands met something solid, and something hard, but nothing that felt like it was capable of biting.

It took far more effort for him to open his eyes.

A mass of blue against his right eye, dull in the poor light; and beyond that something black and jagged and distinctly wet. Nothing that his brain could focus on, just a lagging sense of disaster and fear kept at bay by a solid wall of sheer exhaustion.  
For several minutes he lay in a state of suspended alarm. He felt the urge to get up, to investigate, to prepare and defend or head for cover, but the impulsion towards action was muted by a barrier of numbness.

And, somewhere buried deep beneath everything else, a sense that it was okay. That this solid thing of blue into which one of his hands was gripping still was the very definition of safety and rightness. That the way his head rose and fell slightly was the breathing proof that, even though the world had upended itself onto him at some point very recently, an essential piece of him remained within his reach, alive and accounted for.

The black jagged thing resolved itself into rocks, reaching above him into a slate gray sky. The blue thing – well, that was an IR uniform, and the yellow sash around which his fingers were wrapped – that was Gordon. A cascading wash of images behind his eyes, black and white and nightmarish – that was all that remained of the chaotic horror that was their efforts to get to land from deep beneath the North Sea.

Ah. Well, not quite all. The second he moved it was as though his body had been waiting for the chance to pummel him in complaint. Everything blared at once – his chest, his back, his legs. His head was still encased in the diving helmet, and as he tried to lift it his neck joined in the chorus of ache – or, in the case of his left buttock, outright pain as he shifted against the sharp rocks on which they lay.

Gingerly he raised a hand in front of his helmet, looking for the bite marks that woke him. There were none. As he watched them shake, he realised the cold and the scalding salt that came with scrambling through wild seawater and rocks in the dark had rendered his fingers bruised and raw.

He realised something else. His watch was broken, the casing completely ripped from it. As he flexed his fingers he felt the deep hurt beneath the watch that told of an arm being smashed against rocks, somewhere in the madness of last night.  
He tried several times unsuccessfully to raise himself up on an elbow, but it wasn’t until he turned his head, as gracelessly as a drunk, that he realised he was completely entangled with Gordon and any chance of getting up depended on him pulling an arm from beneath his brother’s chest and his left leg from between Gordon’s legs.

Gordon was still unconscious. As Virgil extricated himself, he took the chance to feel Gordon’s pulse. It was steady, and he muttered something as Virgil shifted his body in order to get clear. It wasn’t clear what he said beyond a general tone of ‘fuck off, it’s too early’, but the way he snuffled and then resettled meant any immediate fears about injury were assuaged. Virgil couldn’t help gently running his hands over Gordon’s chest and legs just to satisfy himself on that score. Gordon was unconscious because Gordon had been awake and working hard for more than twenty four hours at the time they’d hit the water; he deserved a lay in.

Unsteadily, Virgil got to his feet and looked about him. They were lying in a narrow, shallow gully that ended in a shale covered stretch of shoreline. To their immediate right lay the rusted hull of a boat, torn by wind and waves into a skeleton of dull red steel. Beyond that the rocks allowed for a relatively easy path upwards, to where the rain slashed unrelentingly across the surface of the land. 

The moment he moved he realised one very acute, very practical problem; no boots. Sharp stones bit into his soles, where his uniform stretched thinly across his feet, unprotected and unprotecting. 

That was going to be a damned nuisance, but nothing he couldn’t cope with. Nothing that would stop him finding a radio, hot showers, food, and all the warm beds in the world. 

He hesitated; should he leave Gordon here, sleeping, in order to explore their surroundings? He checked the seaweed line on the rocks, and on the struts that formed the bones of the boat. It looked to him as though they’d come up with the extent of the tide last night, but just in case, and ignoring the way his muscles gave him a severe ‘hell to the no’, he bent over and pulled Gordon up, dragging him under his armpits, to the top end of the gully. A slight overhang formed a natural shelter, unnecessary given the thermal protection offered by their suits but somehow comforting. 

He positioned Gordon on his side and watched as he shifted his shoulders as if snuggling beneath covers – which is when his brain registered what Gordon had been lying on and was still clinging to. A survival pack. In the midst of that black maelstrom of ripping current and wrenching waves, Gordon had hung on to both his brother and a pack. Virgil had lost his somewhere in the ascent as he struggled to keep the diving line loose.

“Wow, Gordo.” His voice sounded hoarse. “You just don’t know how to give up, do you?”

Truth be told, he had high hopes that up the gully’s side he’d find houses, a research station, some kind of building with some kind of people to give them food and shelter and a way of contacting IR. But if that hope proved futile, a single pack clutched in his little brother’s hand could mean the difference between survival and extinction.

Time to find out what kind of hand Fate had dealt them. He straightened right up.

And it felt as though someone had poured concrete down his back in the night. He gasped, and reached forward to grip the overhang, trying to breathe the pain out through his mouth, slowly, slowly.

Ohh, this was going to suck in every way imaginable. But god knows he hadn’t done much to help the situation since – well, hell, he hadn’t done much in the rescue, let alone the moment since Two got hit. And Gordon was depending on him.  
Finding help was his priority number one. Concertinaed backs could wait.

Gingerly, feeling muscles catch and resist, he rolled his shoulders in an attempt to get some looseness into them. It was going to be shitty beyond words, climbing out of here into the rain, but if it meant a radio and warm food in half an hour, he’d take whatever kind of hell his body was going to give him. There was one important task before he left, though. He reached into a pouch on his sash and pulled out the all-weather communication pad they used on rescues for notes to other rescue services or to each other. With hands rendered clumsy by seawater and cold he punched in the letters.

‘Up top. Virgil.’

It was so important after the near-extinction of the last day that he could write his full name.

He left it propped in Gordon’s eye-line for whenever he woke, and turned to the task of climbing up the rocks that formed the vee shape of the gully. They were slick with rain, and as he carefully lifted himself up on them, unconsciously waiting for his back to seize up altogether, he drew closer to the weather that was so sharply slanted it didn’t even reach down onto the shoreline of the gully.

When eventually he cleared the rocks, the wind and rain were so fierce he almost turned about at once. 

Grim. His first thought. Closely followed by well, crap.

Visibility was limited, and what he could see was utterly disappointing. No buildings within sight; just turf, flattened under the onslaught of the rain, a gradual slope downwards and then a rise towards an obscured peak. It was impossible to tell the size of the land. Gordon had thought it an island, but Virgil held dim hopes of it being an isthmus, something connected to a larger body of land that held more chance of habitation.

He turned, carefully as an old man, to look back down. He could only see Gordon’s feet poking out from under the overhang, then the skeletal boat, and beyond that, the great churning charcoal mass of the North Sea. The rain drummed on his helmet, and the waves surged and crashed endlessly.

He had a sudden sensation of aloneness more absolute than any he had ever experienced in his life, even in space.

Bleak. That was the next word that came to mind. Bleak, and isolated, and alone.

An involuntary shiver. He wasn’t really cold, his IR suit saw to that, although his fingers were having a few words on the subject. He tucked his hands under his armpits and began trudging forward, his shoulders rounded, his whole body tucked forward to defend against the pain within and the rain without.

And then he started to babble to himself, and the words were meant to comfort but they echoed in the sterile chamber of his heart, hollowed out by loss.

“So, Scott. I don’t know where you are buddy, but I know you’re someplace warm and safe and you’re just about furious right now. You’re never gonna let me hear the end of this, are you? I crashed my girl. Me, Virgil Tracy, Mr Dependable. The responsible one. The boring one. Yep, that’s me. The first one to deep six his bird.

“I guess I could argue the point about fault. That death ray whammied us good and proper. Don’t know if we’re talking The Hood, or some local nutjob. I’m banking on it being a localised thing, because – well, you know why.

“So right now I’m walking across the most godforsaken bit of bog in the middle of the North Sea, and the fact I’m doing that is down to sheer damned luck. And Gordon. He was amazing, Scotty, you’d be so damned proud of the Squidlet. Us being here is an act of will, sheer darn determination, and I owe him big time. You better believe I’m going to step up now. Or – uh, step in it, because this whole patch of ground is so darn wet it’s like wading across a marsh.”

_Scott’s dead. John’s dead. They’re gone. They’re gone. ___

__“I can see something on the top of the hill facing me now. Looks like a ruined building of some sort. Might have a better sense of where we are if I get up there. Might need to go back and get Gordon first though. I miss my wingman.”_ _

__He paused. Through the rain he saw something that looked unnatural, a straight line in the unremitting treeless landscape of grass and rock.  
“So anyway, Scott, I really hope you’re gearing up the big search and rescue right about now. Any time you want to fly on over and give me a wave, that’d be fine with me. And you can – oookay. What have we here?”_ _

__His heart thumped. As he approached it he thought it was a low hut, but as he got closer he realised that if that was once true, it was now a ruin. It was clearly built without mortar, the shale-like stones carefully placed one on the other to create once solid walls, now covered in lichen and moss. The whole thing was open to the sky, whatever roof it once had now reduced to rotted beams in one corner beneath a pile of broken slates._ _

__Still, a wind break was an essential in survival, and as he half-hobbled inside the space created, he looked with an eye trained to find whatever possible could be used to create shelter. It was an acknowledgement of something he hadn’t wanted to face since he crawled up and onto the surface of the land; that this place was deserted. No one lived here now, even if they once did. He’d felt it keenly as he looked across the windswept hills but he’d kept searching as a matter of due diligence. Foolish to listen to intuition if an hour’s search would prove it wrong._ _

__At the back of the ruined square of walls, disappearing under the hill, was exactly what he hoped to find in lieu of actual habitation._ _

__Abruptly he turned back. His intuition was telling him to find Gordon – or maybe it was simply the overwhelming loneliness of the place that was urging him to company._ _

__He reached the top of the gully in less than ten minutes, and half slithered down to reach the shale covered inlet._ _

__“Whoa. Look who decided to come back and get me.” Gordon was sitting upright, one leg extended in front of him, the other knee bent and supporting his elbow. He had taken off his helmet under the shelter of the overhang and set it carefully beside himself. He looked tired, and battered, but he gave Virgil a crooked grin and the sight of him was enough to nudge Virgil towards something like hope. “So is this a misplaced tropical resort?”_ _

__“Not so much.” Virgil dropped carefully, wincingly down beside him and followed suit in removing his helmet. It felt good to have the bracing sea air in his face. “We’re pretty much on our own here, as far as I could tell.”_ _

__“Do we get to name it? And not something lame like Tracy Island. Boy, was that a missed opportunity.”_ _

__“You want to come see what I found?”_ _

__“Is it a pony?”_ _

__“What would you do with a pony?”_ _

__“Uh – ride it?”_ _

__“Ha.” Virgil grinned tiredly at him. “Why do I always expect something stupid from you?”_ _

__“And brush it and feed it and make it all pretty.”_ _

__“Come on.” He bent down and slowly helped Gordon up by his arm. The way Gordon wavered a little as he got to his feet had Virgil reaching around his shoulders to steady him. He felt his brother flinch as his arm came in contact with his back.  
“Bit sore today?”_ _

__“Bit. Nothing like a swim in a washing machine to smarten a fella up.”_ _

__“Mm. I think it was the ice crusher beforehand that probably did it.”_ _

__“We get to have all the fun, don’t we?”_ _

__“That we do.”_ _

__Painfully, with Virgil occasionally reaching up to support him, Gordon climbed up and out of the gully. Virgil’s hand was on Gordon’s butt to help hoist him over the edge, so he felt it when the force of the wind and rain had Gordon reeling backwards._ _

__“Steady, Gords.”_ _

__“Wow. That’s delightful.” Gordon dropped his head so that he could bull through against the weather battering them both._ _

__“Come on. Down here.” Virgil ignored his own body’s howling and took the pack from him. He gripped Gordon’s upper arm to almost pull him along beside him for the half mile trek. He brought his brother, who was sometimes stumbling in a manner so unlike his usual graceful sureness, back down to the ruin and what he’d found beyond._ _

__“Hey. You found a fixer-upper.” Gordon climbed in wobbly slow motion over the remnants of one side wall to stand in the overgrown centre of the ruin. “Love the skylight effect.”_ _

__“Oh ye of little faith. Have a look over here.” Virgil stepped over to where a hint of darkness poked above the tangle of old roof beams. He carefully reached down to push aside one of the beams, out and back to clear and widen the gap.  
In front of him now was the entrance to an underground room, carved into the base of the hill. He bent down to peer inside, and Gordon came to look beside him._ _

__“You take me to all the best places, bro.” But Gordon’s eyes, half obscured in his helmet, were alight with interest and hope. He reached over to drag aside a particular clump of grass that hung down over the entrance._ _

__“I’m guessing cellar. A while back, too.” Virgil didn’t have to say anything more about the benefit of being underground. In one fell swoop he had discovered their best hope of long term survival. If he wore a particularly pleased expression on his face, he wouldn’t apologise for it._ _

__“After you.” Gordon gestured, and Virgil gave a tiny bow and pushed inside. It was small, and the ceiling was low, but it extended far enough that he and Gordon could lie full length and still be well out of the challenging weather._ _

__“It ain’t Southforks, but it’s good enough for the Tracy boys.”_ _

__“You try and carry me over the threshold and I will hurt you.” Gordon crowded in behind. He peered around at the walls, covered in stones carefully set into the earth, then stamped on the packed earth floor. “Well, alright then.” He dropped the survival pack, last opened in Thunderbird Four, and pulled at the seal. “Let’s do a makeover.”_ _

__“If you’ve got an Hawaiian print curtain in there…”_ _

__Gordon grinned, tiredly. “Nope. But we do have – ooh, look, a warming cube thing, courtesy of Brains.”_ _

__“That’s good.”_ _

__“Aand – this feels like Christmas, you know, Santa’s sack – we got a – ooh!“_ _

__Virgil sighed. “It’s like listening to a child. We’ve got a what?”_ _

__“Look!” Gordon pulled out a plastic thing in the shape and colour of an orange segment. With a twist of his wrist it opened out into a circle; with another flick, the circle opened out into a tube.  
“We got a FBS.”_ _

__“A swag. Great!” Virgil felt disproportionately pleased. Something about bedding down on the cold, packed earth of the cellar bothered him more than it should. The survival swag was a lightweight, weatherproof sleeping shelter, which could accommodate two people at a pinch. “I’m not going to ask what FB stands for.”_ _

__“Well, Virge, when two sailors who love each other very, very much get stuck together in one of these they become Fu –“_ _

__“Yeah, I’ll pass. What else?”_ _

__“Protein bars. Uh, wait a sec… eighteen, which means at one a day we’ve got sustenance for nine days.” His countenance fell. “Shoulda stocked this better.”_ _

__“One every two days.”_ _

__Gordon grimaced, but didn’t argue. He dug deeper._ _

__“A good multi-purpose knife, all shiny, a flashlight, water purifier, yay fishing line, a radio beacon – which, wait up, lemme – yeah, like everything else useful, does not seem to be working – pannikin, chemical cooker. Chocolate!” He waved the block like a prize. “And a bag of cocaine. First aid kit. Oh, and, if I pull back the front flap – an emergency blanket.” He pulled the large, silvery square of heat saving material out of the bag and handed it to Virgil._ _

__“Hmm.” Virgil ignored the cocaine bit and looked from the blanket to their surroundings. “I’m thinking the best use we can make of this is to close up the front here. We should be warm enough in the swag, and with the cube.”_ _

__Gordon waved at him magnanimously. “Go. Do engineery things. While you’re at it, can you explain why the radio beacon is out? That’s supposed to be a failsafe.”_ _

__“I don’t know.” Virgil frowned at the entrance to the cellar, surrounded as it was by shards of slate. “I was thinking about that. Could be that EMF was something we’ve never seen before, if it was able to just about drain the batteries as well as the chemical engines on our birds.”_ _

__“Well isn’t that a comforting thought.” Gordon started to set up the sleeping swag, stretching out the struts at the bottom to hold it open enough for them both to crawl in. Virgil glanced towards him and saw how he was looking at the set-up, at the grayness in his face._ _

__“Hey. How about you get some shuteye? I can fiddle around with this doorway.”_ _

__“Nah, I’ll keep you company. Besides, you need an overseer.”_ _

__“I really don’t. Get some sleep, Gordon.”_ _

__He thought for a moment that Gordon was going to continue to argue – but then his brother gave an enormous yawn as he put the last strut in place. His hands, Virgil saw, were shaking._ _

__“You know, you’re right. Not often I say that but I am a bit – “ another huge yawn. “Yeah, a bit…”_ _

__Despite being up for less than half an hour, it took Gordon all of three minutes to be sound asleep in what had somehow officially become the FBS._ _

__Virgil worked his shoulders again, easing them through several slow rotations while his weary mind turned to the problem of making the room as warm as it could be._ _

__He needed to apply some lateral thinking to get the space blanket set up the way he wanted it. In the end he used strapping from the survival pack and his laser in order to melt it into a sticky substance which he smeared along the top of the stone lintel and then held the blanket against as it dried and hardened. He did the same down one side, and left one flap loose but able to be held fastened with a lichen covered rock he collected from outside._ _

__It should have made the earthen room cosier, but now that they were enclosed in its space, he suddenly shivered. More than once he found himself glancing up as if he had to, as if there was a threat to the little brother who looked so vulnerable lying asleep with his yellow head cradled on his arms._ _

___Scott’s dead. John’s dead. ____ _

____He would not have admitted it if Gordon was awake, but some part of his brain, the part that brought the poetry and bypassed the practicality, kept sending him little alarm signals - as if there was something to watch for here. Another presence in the shelter, watching them and demanding to be acknowledged._ _ _ _

____Imagination was a wonderful thing, and Virgil was grateful to his every time he lost himself in his music, or summoned up images to bring to canvas and paint – but right now, an overactive imagination in a head still exhausted from a battle for survival was not what he needed._ _ _ _

____Quietly, so as not to disturb Gordon, he pulled back the blanket and stepped outside, re-fastening his helmet again as he did so. There was another task to be achieved here today, and that was the securing of a fresh water supply. Not something that immediately came to mind in this constant downpour, but Virgil knew how essential clean water would be to their survival._ _ _ _

____He turned and studied where the edge of the hut met the small hill behind it. The rain ran down in a natural channel there, to create a small pool at the base of the wall. Virgil eyed it with approval. It was all rock, one large gray stone that years of water had hollowed out in the centre._ _ _ _

____“Let’s see what the application of a little laser power can do for you,” he said softly. He aimed the laser around the hollow and turned it on, lifting an arm to protect himself from the instant burst of steam created by the heat hitting the water. He angled the laser so that it dug down and under the current circumference, creating an artificial stone lip around a significantly deeper hole when he was done._ _ _ _

____When the steam cleared at last, he nodded his approval. One natural, if somewhat enhanced, water storage unit, right by their door. Virgil watched in satisfaction as the water that had been running off from the stone top now collected in the rock pool.  
He tried stretching again, wincing, and looked up towards where the ghostly bulk of the hill loomed in the growing darkness. There was no way of knowing the actual time, but still, Virgil felt as though it got dark relatively early. It hadn’t been that late when he woke on the beach, had it? Then again, this far north, in early March, the days would be short. And probably brutal. Witness Exhibit A._ _ _ _

____It was easier to stand in the rain and speculate about time than admit his reluctance to climb back into the shelter. Out here, in the clean air, he could name the feeling that crowded into him, even with Gordon beside him, even with the warming cube and the swag and their dryness and safety._ _ _ _

____It felt like death in there._ _ _ _

____And if that is true, Virgil scolded himself suddenly, what the hell are you doing leaving your brother alone with it?_ _ _ _

____The thought hurried him as nothing else would, and he scrambled back over the wall and under the blanket, to find Gordon sleeping peacefully and the warming cube sending a soft glow about the room in a way that should feel comforting but somehow just wasn’t._ _ _ _

____Virgil prided himself on his strength of mind, on his ability to focus and maintain calm in the face of tremendous stress. So why couldn’t he grapple with whatever the hell was chasing him now? Okay, they’d had a tough run, but they were alive, right? Right?_ _ _ _

____But their Thunderbirds were gone. The craft designed and built by his father and handed to him in an act of trust and privilege was destroyed._ _ _ _

____And worse, far worse than that, was the gnawing, pounding sense that the two big, untouchable, unsinkable brothers who had kept him safe all his life were gone, too._ _ _ _

____Virgil sat down cross-legged on the cold floor and stared at the warming cube. It made no sense to keep watch; there was no real threat here, nothing but ghosts of the mind and heart. But nothing could compel him to stand down. While this deep sense of unease remained, he would stand guard; and when Gordon woke in the morning, his brother would be there to welcome him to the first morning of their new life._ _ _ _


	4. To the lighthouse

To the lighthouse

True to his promise to himself, Virgil saw the light about the edge of the blanket grow into a sliver of gray. As feeble as the light was, it was enough to waken Gordon, who gave an immense intake of breath and yawn before crawling from the swag to look outside. It was only when he pulled his head back from under the space blanket that he smiled a sleepy acknowledgement at Virgil.

“Well, we have misty rain. Or is that rainy mist?” Gordon scratched his thick blond hair and yawned again.

“I don’t know.” Virgil held up two protein bars. “What we do have is breakfast. Which also happens to be lunch and supper, but still.”

“Gimme, gimme.” 

The bars were designed to incorporate enough nutrition to satisfy the needs of an adult for one day. They didn’t manage to satisfy the hunger pangs that would come by day’s end, but this morning they tasted like heaven.

“So, exploring today?” Gordon munched on his bar as though it was the most exciting thing he’d ever put in his mouth.

“That’s the plan.”

“Cool. You know, I wouldn’t mind going out there without the helmet –“

“Except for how you know very well it’s a part of the homeostasis effect of the suit. And the polymer coating keeps the rain from beading, so we can see better with it anyway.”

“Yeah, yeah. Ugh.” Gordon scratched at his head vigorously. A thin stubble was starting to shadow his jaw. “Did you get the hot shower working while I took my manly nap yesterday?”

“Sorry.” His skull felt as though it were splitting in two, and for a second, Virgil thought of the paracetamol in the survival bag. But either one of them could get a serious fever and truly need them later on. Better to suck this up and deal with it the old fashioned way rather than waste medical supplies that might spare brain damage or save a life down the track. Virgil scratched at his own dark stubble, slowly stood and stretched and immediately regretted it, as stiffened muscles caught and burned and the low ceiling hit his already pounding head. Gordon, predictably, snickered.

“Alright, short stuff. Let’s get going.” Wearily, Virgil gave Gordon a kick, grabbed his helmet, and stepped outside. He heard Gordon muttering behind him, but then his brother joined him to gaze about the island.

Visibility was much better today. The rain was light- as Gordon had said, more of a mist – and so, when they slowly made it to the top of the small rise that housed their shelter, for the first time they could see clearly to both ends of their new home. 

No isthmus, or peninsula; the sea extended as far as they could see, a gray, unending mass. They were almost in the middle of an island, and today they could tell that their ruin was not the only one. Further to their left, as they faced north, were more signs of people long gone; low walls of stone, headstones sinking into the turf, even a small, enclosed tower, roofless like every other building and starting to crumble badly onto the skeletal remains of what looked like a tiny church on the side closest to them.

The southern end sloped downwards to where the sea had carved a tunnel through the rock, creating the tiniest isthmus possible. Virgil could hear the sea sucking and squelching through it, occasionally releasing a boom of noise as the water surged. The northern end rose to a smooth and significant height a kilometer or so away, on top of which they could see a white building, tiny with distance.

“Could be something up there? Lighthouse, maybe?” Gordon managed to sound hopeful and skeptical at the same time.

Nodding, Virgil set off towards it, swearing under his breath as his unprotected foot met a half hidden stone, and with a theatrical groan, Gordon followed.

They said nothing for a short time, listening instead to the never-ending sounds of the sea meeting rock all around them. Today with less wind and rain they could hear other sounds, too; seabirds, calling and chattering, and another sound that had Gordon grinning.

“Seals. I do love me some seals.”

The fact that an extended stay here would mean seal meat would be on the menu was one Virgil decided to keep to himself.

“So what are we gonna call this place?”

Virgil grunted, saving his breath as they climbed. 

“Soggy Ass Island? Precipitation Paradise? All the stones you can eat, plus twenty four hour wet. Hey, maybe Lucille Island, after Mom?”

“No.” He didn’t elaborate, but the thought came to him as clearly as if he’d said it out loud; this might be the place that kills us. Don’t think Mom would want that.

Huh. A night of heebie-jeebies does wonders for your frame of mind.

“Okay, Grumpa. How about mash-up names? Gordon and Virgil - Gorgil? Ugh, sounds like a sick celebrity. Virgedon – verged on awful. Planet Virgo. That’s just officially giving up on ever getting laid.”

Virgil stopped and looked at him.

“Amen to that. Let’s make a pact – no cannibalism and no incest.”

Gordon laughed. “I was gonna make some crack there but –you got me. Consider that one done in stone.”

Even Gordon’s chatter died away as the climb grew steeper. It looked like it should have been easy going underfoot, but stones lurked beneath tough grass, and the slope was enough that tired bodies already stiff and bruised from the crash and their subsequent night swim complained long and loud. If the glimpse of white up ahead hadn’t drawn them on, Virgil would have called a halt.

But as they gained height, Virgil saw that whatever the building had once been – and Gordon’s guess of a lighthouse was a good one – it was now thoroughly destroyed.

And all at once, he knew where they were.

“Scott!”

Gordon pulled alongside him, looked from where Virgil was pointing, then back to Virgil, and shook his head.

“We’ve had this talk, Virge. Scott just seems like he’s made of stone. But he’s actually a real boy made of flesh and – ow!”

“Moron.” Cuff to the back of the head given, Virgil turned on his heel, searching the shoreline far below. He found what he was looking for – the ruins of what looked like a small bomber. “There! See?”

“Still not Scott – don’t hit me!” Gordon ducked away.

“Don’t you remember? Scott told us about shooting down a Bereznik drone bomber. Some breakaway mission deal, was flying over to the US. Word was it was supposed to bomb New York.”

“And big brother took it out? Way to go, Scotty!”

Virgil gestured to the lighthouse remains.

“Yeah, and the crash took out the lighthouse. The government of Scotland was distinctly unamused. Sent the Air Force a bill for ‘wilful destruction of government property and reckless lighthouse endangerment’.”

“You gotta be kidding me!”

“Nope, but the Scottish guys were.” Virgil smiled faintly, remembering Scott’s initial indignation.

“So this is - ?”

“The island of Rona.” 

“Rona!” Gordon hopped excitedly. “North freakin’ Rona!”

Virgil did a double take.

“You know about Rona?”

“Sure, yeah. I mean, not personally, but there was this girl – “

“Uh-huh.”

“No, not like that. Jeez.” Gordon rolled his eyes. “She was at USC with me, studying ornithology but we shared some classes. She was telling me all about this place, she spent a summer here.” Gordon looked about himself as if seeing the island for the first time. “When the climate crisis came in ‘36 it was the end of the puffin breeding here, and the guillemots, too. The populations just crashed. But Heidi and her team were working on re-establishing a breeding ground here for them both. And there’s some other bird, too, some kind of petrel that comes here.”

Virgil nodded. “That’s all good news.”

“How come?”

“If ornithologists are interested in this place – “

“There could be teams coming out here. Soon, really, must be close to breeding time.” Gordon clapped Virgil on the back, ignoring his brother’s wince. “There’s another island somewhere over there, just as empty, but I think they do diving round it. Huh. Rona. Good old Heidi.”

It was a feeble hope, one heavily dependent on the nature and scope of whatever had brought Thunderbird Two down.

They recommenced walking up the hill.

“So – Heidi?”

Gordon chuckled. “Just a friend. She was too obsessed by birds. She was obsessed by birds in the way Alan’s obsessed with racing cars and Scott’s obsessed with striking heroic poses.”

“Scott is not – “

“Tell me you haven’t seen the footage John’s got from One’s launch bay! Have you seen the way Scott stands as he goes out to his ‘bird? It’s Drake on the bow of the Golden Hind, it’s Cortez seeing the Pacific.”

“Tell me you don’t have a moment every time you get into Four’s driving seat!”

It struck them both at the same time, the thought of Four, crashed and crippled on an undersea pinnacle of rock.

Gordon looked away, swallowed.

“Yeah. Well. Guess you’ll have to ask John if you can watch the footage when we get back.”

And the thought of John was another minefield. Virgil started climbing faster, pushing the worry back down with pure expenditure of energy, a kind of physical counterfeit to fool his own mind.

Together they climbed the last part of the slope to reach the shattered remains of the old Rona Lighthouse. It had always been an automated one, and now it was nothing but a shell. The large scar across rock and turf where the drone had hit and barrelled across the top of the peak still showed, three years after the event. Virgil skirted the outside of it and then slowly clambered in, looking carefully through the ruins for anything that could help them survive on lonely Rona Island.

He found varying lengths of steel rods, steel wire, a sheet of metal that might come in handy. Gordon busied himself looking down the cliff face directly north of the lighthouse. He came back just as Virgil piled his scavenged goods on top of the large metal sheet.

“There are nesting birds here, alright, but I can’t see how we’re gonna get to them. It’s just about impossible to climb down to them from here, and no way you’re getting up from below.” He looked with interest at Virgil’s pile. “You been shopping?”

“I have. And thinking. I can do two things at once.”

“Oh, you know, they say you’re not funny, but I think you’re all kinds of cute when you try.”

Virgil ignored him, always a sound policy, and pointed down the slope.

“How about I use the laser, see if I can’t write an SOS on the turf?”

“You want me to draw the letters so you can trace over them?”

Virgil thought for a minute; then he hefted the sheet and started back down the hill. Gordon watched him go, then opened his arms in query and called from above.

“So you’re not gonna put out the SOS, or - ?”

“We don’t know who would see it.” Virgil stopped and waited for Gordon to catch up. “Think about it. If someone fired that EMF at us, they’d most likely do it from a plane or a sub. Either one would be alerted to our survival if we carve out an SOS on the hill.”

“But so would John or Brains or Scott. They’ll be looking too, Virge.”

Virgil opened his mouth to say something, then shut it firmly and just shook his head.

“Aw, come on, bro. You know they’re not gonna give up on us.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s too risky.” Virgil spared one hand from the sheet of metal to gesture around. “We’re completely indefensible here. If someone came to this island who wanted to finish off the job, we’d have no chance.” He continued trudging down the hill.

After several seconds, Gordon caught up and stumped along in blessed silence beside him for a short way, before muttering, “You have a sucky mind.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Virgil, just as softly.

Nothing more was said until they reached the bottom of the hill, when Gordon took the other end of the metal sheet and hefted it up off the ground. It was awkward, but easier than dragging. Virgil didn’t know why he was salvaging it, really; there were vague ideas of using it to improve the wind protection of their door, but the engineer in his soul simply told him it could be useful.

The sea looked slate green now, and the wind picked up to bring white tops to the waves that began methodically crashing harder against the shore. They humped their load across the boggy ground until at last they could drop it by the shelter. Gordon stretched and winced.

“Shoulda booked a massage.”

“Mmm.” Virgil squinted through his helmet against the steadily increasing rain, an action born of habit, not necessity, then sighed. “You know it’s March 12th?”

“Oh, wow. It’s Alan’s birthday today.” Gordon looked surprised. “How did I forget that?” 

Virgil shrugged. “Not really anything to celebrate, is there? This would have to go down as pretty much one of the worst Tracy birthdays ever.”

Gordon stopped trying to stretch and looked at him, his expression hard to read.

“How can you say that?”

Virgil frowned in turn.

“You want me to spell it out?” When Gordon’s expression didn’t change, Virgil ground his teeth. “Fine. Our ‘birds are gone. We’re stuck on one of the least hospitable islands on Earth. The rest of the family - “ he paused, then kept going, “are probably out of their minds with worry about now. We don’t know how widespread that attack was, if there’s anyone even capable of coming to rescue us. You want more?”

“Okay.” Gordon crossed his arms and squared his stance. “That’s one reading of the situation. Or, you know, it could be one of the best ever.”

“Gordon, just – “ 

“What?”

“Spare me the positivity crap, alright? There’s looking on the bright side and then there’s blanket naivety.”

“Fine.” Gordon harrumphed for all of five seconds, and then began, “All I was going to say – “

“Seriously?”

“- is that we’re both alive. We both made it this far. In spite of a whole lot of shit that was trying to make it, like, the exact opposite. That makes it a pretty good birthday, in my book.”

It was a fair point. On any other day, Virgil might have conceded it, even applauded it. But today his head hurt, and his back hurt, and he was hungry and tired and this place seemed even more isolated and desolate than when he woke this morning. They’d seen no one and nothing all day except a ruin, rocks, and a wretched seascape that extended for as far as eyes could see in this miserable weather.

And one part of his mind wondered if Gordon didn’t actually see this as some sort of Boy’s Own adventure. Shipwrecked! Marooned on an island! What exciting adventures will the Tracy Boys find as they battle nature and all the elements?

He wished, suddenly and fiercely, for Scott to be there and shouldering half this burden that seemed to be his alone.

“I guess. Sorry, Gordon. I’m beat. I’m gonna go lay down for a while.” He nodded towards the rain soaked hill. “You want to celebrate, knock yourself out.”

He should have felt mean, and maybe somewhere in his heart, he did; but most of all, he just felt exhausted. The FBS looked welcoming when he got inside the shelter, and it felt good to take off the helmet and cradle the warming cube in his hands.

Tomorrow was a No Food Day. Tomorrow was going to be worse.

All he could do now, while daylight still lingered, was sleep, while the ghosts of Rona did the same.


	5. Sesame street

Gordon wrote the note on their com-board; Gone 4 run. V W.

That was worth a little chuckle, it drove his brothers nuts when he actually showed he was capable of reading something other than a Surf’s Up mag. Would Virgil get the reference? Maybe, maybe not. If he did, it would annoy him because he’d think it was Gordon showing off. If he didn’t, it would annoy him because Gordon could make a literary reference he couldn’t. Either way, win-win, and a good bout of annoyance might drag Virgil out of his downer of a mood.

Said mood was a bit of a worry, if Gordon was being honest with himself – and hey, it was Wednesday, third full day on Rona, Island of Sun and Fun, may as well devote one day to something like that. He needed to lift his game where big brother was concerned. Subdued Virgil was worrying Virgil. Worrying Virgil needed distracting.

Gordon knew about concussion. About how it could extend beyond a sore head, into depression, anxiety, paranoia. He remembered when John, age thirteen, came off the barn roof in Kansas after attempting to build a pirate crow’s nest up there for the two youngest to play in. Gordon remembered his bewilderment and fear when his normally unflappable brother became irritable and suspicious and downright nasty for a week before his natural equilibrium reasserted itself.

What he didn’t know was if Virgil’s moodiness came from the situation or his injury, and the uncertainty didn’t sit well with him. One suggested something to be dealt with by ignoring it and bringing demented levels of cheer until his brother succumbed and joined him. The other – the other made Gordon’s stomach tighten. The other was beyond his ability to help, and could signal something far worse. Because Gordon also remembered overhearing hushed conversations when John was hurt, about permanency and damage and wait-and-see, hope-for-best.

Worrying Virgil was off down the south end of the island, playing around near the narrow inlet that irregularly gave off a deep boom as the sea surged into it. The sound echoed across the island and reminded Gordon of the bow of a ship, crashing through waves. What Virgil was doing down there was something he hadn’t thought fit to share; most probably, just mooching about and labelling it exploring. There was precious little to do, after all, so whatever got him out of the shelter, that was fine by Gordon. Maybe all his brother needed was a little time to himself and some of the bracingly fresh air they had in abundance.

He dumped everything out of the survival bag and hoisted it over his shoulder. Virgil would be annoyed when he came back and found the mess, but you never knew what you’d find up at the lighthouse, and Gordon figured he’d need it to bring back something worthwhile from somewhere.

The weather was squally; sheets of rain sweeping across the island, gusts of wind doing the most. Ah, yes. Rona in March. Honeymooners’ delight. Astonishing they weren’t overrun by campers and day trippers, really. A missed opportunity; you could set up the hot dog stand there, the ice-cream here, the taco truck on the rise…

Oh, dammit. Get running, you fool, and stop thinking about food.

He finished stretching, then headed off at a gentle lope to begin. After a little way he stopped and removed his helmet. The rain was tedious, but not so bad he couldn’t squint through it, and he’d keep warm enough on the run. He set the helmet hanging off one of the gravestones that lurched drunkenly in the shallow depression north of the hut, then got going again, picking up the pace, feeling his thighs and chest start to work.

It felt good to stretch out a little, past the grip of stiff and sore muscles, the springy turf forming the most wonderful surface for his feet. The rain was coming from behind him – it was going to be filthy running back – and even that felt good, his hair getting soaked, his face awash with rainwater dripping from his scalp.

He pushed harder as he hit the base of the hill. And then he hit something else and the world did a somersault.

Or, no, that was him.

Ow.

Ouch, ow, dammit, ow.

Spreadeagled, he lay on his back and waited for his big toe to stop bitching like he’d taken a hammer to it. That hurt. Stupid springy turf with its hidden traps to trip up dashing young aquanauts on a run. He sighed and sat up to reach for his toe and massage it, while looking for whatever ruined his triumphant burst for the top of the hill.

Nothing broken. Which was good, or the full-on pearl-clutch in overdrive Virgil would have given him didn’t bear thinking about. 

And in the grass, almost totally obscured, a gravestone. Wooden, weather-beaten, impossible to read, except – maybe – 

He squinted against the rain and peered closer.

A word, a name beginning with a P and followed by a small e.

And that was enough to set off a cascade of catastrophic imagination.

What if – what if this was all some bizarre time travel thing, and he and Virgil were flung far into the future, and Penny came here looking for them back in 2061, only she died and was buried here, and this was her century old grave, and he and Virgil were trapped, forever, in a time warped hell they could never escape, and everyone else was dead and –

Whoa.

What the hell brought that on?

That was – that was Virgil levels of insane worry, right there.

And they didn’t need that in stereo on this goddam hunk of wet rock.

It was this place. There was something about it, some sense of dread or doom or just sheer forsakenness. The dead lighthouse, the abandoned ruin, all the old gravestones, the lonely old church. Gulls usually sounded evocative to him, exciting, a call to the sea and all its wonders. Here, they sounded mournful. Lost.

No, enough.

It was hunger, that’s all. He’d been hungry as hell after the ice rescue, and when they saw off the scientists at research station Z and he’d caught the lift back up to the cockpit, he had every intention of chowing down with extreme prejudice on at least six protein bars, wrappers optional. And then Virgil had said that name, something about going to meet her, and it was kryptonite levels of weakness and nausea and excitement all at once. Food forgotten. Worse, food totally unable to be ingested.

And what was that? Why did he do that around her? It wasn’t love, he knew that much. Love was all fireworks and pink unicorns with rainbow tails riding on rockets, right? It was slow motion runs down a sunset beach with sparkly dolphins and puppies and really good cheeseburgers. Really good cheeseburgers, with the cheese all melting down the side and jalapenos slathered on top and a basket of golden fries covered in sauce and -

Okay, GC, is this food porn or a romance?

Gordon sat up in the rain, watching as the long grass flailed in the wind even as it flattened beneath the squall. He kind of knew how it felt.

It couldn’t be love. Love wouldn’t make him feel so helpless. For a second he wished Penny was here with him, that he would turn around and she’d be there, with that cool, appraising smile of hers and that thing her blue, blue eyes did when they looked at him. Sometimes. When she wasn’t kicking his butt. But as fast as he conjured her up in his mind, everything inside him cringed backwards in horror. No, he never wanted her anywhere near this place. It hurt, actually hurt, to think of her suffering in any way, and him unable to help her. He wanted her safe, and warm, and well fed. Very well fed. Lots of food. Parker bringing tray after tray of food, under those silver covers, and her in front of a roaring fire, toasty on a soft rug. Eating food.

Being in love meant being awesome, right? Being The Man, being protective and slaying dragons to lay at milady’s feet. Only Penny would probably have slain the dragon two hours earlier and be busily slicing it into sushi. With teriyaki chicken, and rice and wasabi. Oh, and some of those little pork dumplings, and some prawn crackers. So what the hell did she need him for? Court jester? Just sew the bells on his feet right now. Hey nonny fucking nonny.

Actually, thinking of feet was good. Thinking of feet was far preferable to thinking of food that wasn’t going to happen, that hadn’t happened for too many days now, save for a couple of protein bars. Thinking of Virgil’s feet, even better. Because first, they stunk. Everyone said so, even Scott, the guy who pretended to hold himself above all that insult playtime nonsense and then quietly delivered a devastating zinger whenever he felt like it, while somehow still holding all his grown up mature adult points. What he wouldn’t give to see Scott now. 

And that thought brought a different kind of ache. Scott here would be beyond brilliant, because that would mean he was alive, and John was alive, and Grandma and Brains weren’t trapped on Tracy Island.

Shake that one off, quick. Virgil was doing enough wallowing in that particular trench for both of them. And speaking of Virgil and feet…

Yes. Better. Virgil’s feet, killer of all fantasy including food and sex, and more to the point, a problem to be solved.

Big brother bereft of boots meant big brother basically bruising feet on a bitchin’ basis.

Oh, he didn’t complain, because Virgil Grissom Tracy didn’t complain, unless it was about something that didn’t matter. Like Gordon dripping mayonnaise off a salad sandwich in Module Three that time. Or taking the last buffalo wing. Or drinking hot chocolate in front of him in the launch bay when he had his hands full of monkey wrench and socket and couldn’t stop Gordon from stealing his as well. Ha. No, when Virgil was really struggling he kept it to himself. Lucky for him, Gordon noticed things. Like the way Virgil was hobbling (and trying not to show it) back down the hill after their lighthouse expedition. Unlike Gordon’s uniform, which ended in a moulded shoe that was thick and springy and protected his feet, Virgil’s foot covering was simply an extension of the uniform on the rest of his body. Usually, he had his size million boots to protect him from anything, up to and including falling beams and fire.

Now those boots were in Four’s flooded cabin, and Virgil was walking about on rocks and ruined lighthouses in – well, effectively, his socks.

So. No more thinking of the f word – either of them, thank you very much. Here was something he could usefully do. That kelp bed they’d somehow negotiated their way through – yeah, that was a good word to describe the sixteen kinds of hell that swim had been – that would have strands washed up onshore. A good thick hunk of kelp could be carved into feet shapes, and then fastened onto Virgil’s feet. Sure, it would look stupid and smell, but then, so did Virgil.

Oh, hey there, eight year old Gordy, I see you’ve found the keys to the cortex. But then, when did you ever lose them? Hehehe.

Gordon got back to his feet. The rain chose that moment to drift away, turning into more of a mist with an attitude. He gave up on going to the lighthouse and turned to jog back to the shelter, only to immediately pull up with an “Owww” that couldn’t be called anything but whiny, as his bruised toe reminded him of stupid hidden gravestones. So, instead, he manfully hobbled back to the gully and climbed down to the shale-covered beach.

He found what he wanted almost at once; a long, thick strand of kelp, twisted and tangled about the rocks, a yard or so into the water. He waded in and dragged the strand back out, as much as he could, in order to find the thickest part. The piece he decided on was almost two inches thick and over two feet long. From his sash he pulled out the knife from the survival kit and got to work, seated on a glistening black rock with the sea surging in and around his ankles.

He made two sandal shapes and held them up critically. Yeah, they’d do. As Virgil wore them they’d break down, so he’d have to keep replacing them. But kelp there was aplenty, even if it meant going back out there sixty metres or so to where bits of the thick, rolling mass shifted under the waves.

Pleased with himself, he carefully put the knife away in his sash and was about to turn around and climb back out onto the turf when something in the water caught his eye. He stopped, looked, and broke into a grin.

A little gray head, bobbing silently fifteen feet away, staring at him.

“Ohhh.” Gordon felt a starburst of delight. “Hey, little fella. How are you?”

Damn, but he loved seals. Had done, since he was tiny. There was something about them that called to him – their liveliness, their inquisitiveness, the way they skated through water with such effortless grace and speed. He didn’t anthropomorphise animals as a general rule – he was, and it surprised even himself, too much of a scientist for that – but whenever he thought of seals he somehow thought they were happy, and it made him happy too.

Now this grey seal regarded him with large dark eyes, its body perfectly balanced in the water, its roman nose lifted towards him as if it was trying to figure out just what the hell kind of blue and yellow critter sat on the shale and played with kelp. 

“Yeah, I know. I’m weird, huh.” Weird didn’t even begin to cover what Virgil would call him if he found him having conversations with aquatic mammals. “I think your name is Ernie. You look like you know your way around these parts. Know any good bars near here?”

As if in answer, the seal opened its mouth wide and gave a sort of back of the throat cough, unlike the usual hearty calls that emanated from the west side of the island.  
“Ohh, yeah, I heard about that place. But I also heard the guy on the door is a fiend for carding.”

The seal was unimpressed. 

“You’re right, I should just get better ID. You know anyone could help a fellow sailor out?”

As he spoke, he dropped the bag and stepped forward into the water, carefully, unwilling to startle the little animal but unable to resist getting closer. The water was up to mid-thigh as he reached the edge of the drop-off, a precipitous one less than four meters off shore.

Another head popped up close by, took one look at Gordon and disappeared again. He tracked the bubbles as it swum down and away, back towards the kelp bed.

“Wow. Hey, I hate to tell you pal, but your friend is real judgemental. Still, not gonna hold that against you. You seem like a stand-up kinda seal. Don’t see why your friends should get in the way of our relationship here.”

And just like that, the thought of killing and eating the seals of Rona lurched into his consciousness.

His stomach dropped.

Grey seals were heavy with fat and flesh. Their furry skin would make excellent shoes. Seal bones could be carved into fish hooks.

Grey seals meant survival through winter.

Slowly, Gordon stepped back, his mouth tightening.

Loving seals for as long as he could remember meant he had joined a marine conservation club when he was eight years old. Cruelty to animals was just about worse than cruelty to humans in his book, because animals could so rarely fight back. He, John and Virgil kept a regular menagerie of road-wounded animals out the back of the barn in Kansas when they were younger, until John got caught up in high school study and Alan stepped in. Caring for and about animals was simply part of his DNA.

And now he was contemplating taking a rock and bashing in the skull of one.

And the worst part? The truly awful part was that he knew he would do it. 

Deep inside him, in a place he didn’t often like to acknowledge, there was a cold ruthlessness that would probably surprise and horrify his family. You needed it, if you were going to win an Olympic medal, if you were going to make it through WASP training. At the bedrock of his soul there was a hard place that would do whatever it took to see that he and Virgil survived.

As true as that was, he also knew it was true he would hate every damned second of it when he came to face that moment.

Well, shit. It was getting hard keeping those sunshiny thoughts in place when images of bashing in seal heads were insisting on staying front and center in his stupid head.

The seal made another sound, more like a hoarse chuckle, sounding almost human. Gordon grimaced.

“You and me both,” he muttered. “Sorry, Ernie.” Then the little gray nose swung about, and the water behind its head seemed to push onto it in one long, unbroken wave, and every inch of Gordon’s skin prickled with something wild and alert. Even before he could name what it was he knew it as danger.

Rising up out of the water was an enormous dark shape, the most fearsome of the sea. A dorsal fin, cutting through the small waves, creating its own, and three metres behind it the tip of the tail. It was easy, and horrifying, math; a five metre Great White shark.

A second before Gordon had been contemplating just what it could take to kill a little seal like the one before him; now he was stepping back toward it, giving a shout of warning. It wasn’t needed; Ernie the seal dipped below the surface and disappeared, even as the Great White crested through its own bow wave and sank below in chase.

And if there was one thing worse than seeing a dorsal fin coming at you through the waves? It was watching that fin dropping down in readiness for a classic Great White up and under attack, somewhere in your general vicinity.

Gordon didn’t hate sharks, nor did he particularly fear them. He was too knowledgeable for that. But he knew to treat them with respect, and that meant paddling around in murky water with a hungry five metre Great White was not amongst his top ten happy beach-side tips, thanks all the freakin’ same. He turned about, sharply, almost slipping, and lunged back towards the shore. The waves were pushing him to the right, and he didn’t argue; he went with them, using the sea’s power to push himself up and around the low outcrop of rocks that bordered their little gully and beach, scrabbling onto foot- and hand-holds until he was out of the water, panting a little, and not even bothering to feel foolish because hello, name him anyone on the planet who *wouldn’t* damn well scamper outta there with a shark like that up their caboose?

He’d like to bet even Scott would give a squeak or two.

The undignified but completely necessary retreat left him around the corner from the shale beach at the foot of the gully, perched on a rocky outcrop unreachable except through the sea at low tide. It meant he was sitting above a stretch of shoreline he hadn’t explored until now. It meant he hadn’t realised that, sheltered in a tiny scooped out inlet, were thousands and thousands of mussels, covered in sea wrack, clacking as they lifted and fell with the swells.

Gordon gave a whoop.

“Yes! Yes, yes, yes, thank you Ernie!” He fumbled for the knife and began hacking into the bissal threads that kept them attached to the outcrop. “Mytilis edulis, come to daddy.”  
In less than a minute he had more mussels in his hands than he could easily hold, and the issue of getting them back to the gully began to be of concern.

Or not. Gordon gauged the distance, gave a shrug, and then threw the mussels he’d collected as hard as he could back towards the inlet. Most landed on the spit of land between his spot and the beach; some flew onto the shale. Either way, retrievable, problem solved, dinner sorted, and Gordon was so full of himself he stood up and opened his arms to take a curtain call in front of the wheeling gulls and empty sky.

“Thank you, thank you. I’m here all week.” He eyed the dark water beneath him. “Or will be, if Bert the shark hangs about too long.”

Getting back around the rock to the beach was the next challenge. The sea rose and dropped at his feet where he stood, but it was impossible to climb much higher from this side. He would have to get back into the water, at least waist deep, in order to get back to where he could find footing on the beach side.

No problem. Sharks don’t like the taste of humans. Sharks don’t attack humans if there is other food around.

Sharks just might take a bite to figure out what the hell kind of blue and yellow critter scuttled around the rocks like this.

See, Penny would love this. She’d sit up there on the rock, laughing at him, that light, musical sound that made his toes curl up and turned his brain to mush, and he’d look up and say, “Okay, your Ladyship, just watch me now and see how Gordon Cooper Tracy dances with sharks,” and she’d say, “By all means, Gordon, only be sure to not step on the poor thing’s toes,” and he’d say “I do not step on toes when I dance!” and she’d say, “Oh, whatever helps you sleep at night,” and then he’d think about night-time, and curling up next to her, and…

Damn.

Well, that was one way to distract yourself when you were about to drop back on top of a Great White. Ride ‘em Cowboy.

As quickly as he could, his head half-turned to the sea behind him, his body tight against the rock, Gordon forced his cold fingers to find holds in the rock and crab-walked his way around the outcrop. Sometimes he was forced to drop to shoulder depth in the water, and he found his breath coming in short huffs as he willed himself to go faster, faster, little adrenaline spikes shooting up his spine. When he finally got clear enough to leave the rock and wade through the water he splashed out so fast he could almost hear Penny laughing at him, stumbling and slipping and just scooting the hell outta Dodge.

Safely back on the beach, he gave a long exhalation of breath and gathered up his tattered dignity even as he gathered up the mussels and dropped them into the survival bag.  
He didn’t realise how many he’d harvested until he went to lift the bag over his shoulder. Far more than they could eat in one sitting, of course, but that was alright; he had a Plan.  
At the top of the gully he saw Virgil coming towards him. That was worth an enthusiastic wave, even as Virgil got closer and Gordon saw the sour look on his face.

“Ah. I see you noticed my carefully arranged pile of artifacts in our cubby?”

“I saw where you dumped everything and left it, yeah.” Virgil stood with his hands on his hips, waiting for Gordon to come to him. 

“For a good cause, brother mine,” said Gordon.

“I doubt it.” 

Wow. Tough room. Grumpy even by Virgil’s connoisseur standards. Do your job, Gordo. Demented cheer. Sunshiny thoughts, remember?

“Did you get my message? V W?”

A huff.

“Virginia Wolfe. To the Lighthouse. Very clever.”

But not worth a smile, apparently. Next.

“Hey. I made you something.”

Gordon set down the survival bag and reached into the front pocket. He watched as the tightness around Virgil’s eyes loosened a little as he gingerly accepted the offered pieces of carved kelp.

“These are - ?”

“Flip flops. For your feet,” he added unnecessarily. Virgil lifted an eyebrow.

“Wow, Gordon. Thanks. They’re – they’re disgusting.”

Gordon chuckled.

“Hey, asshole, don’t worry about my feelings or anything. Look, I know the rocks on this place aren’t doing your ridiculous size 30 hoofers any favors, so I thought these might help.”

“I – guess?”

“I figure, we cut off the straps from this bag, split them and tie them around your feet to keep the flip flops on.”

Virgil looked even more dubious.

“Won’t they just squish the minute my weight gets on them?”

“Squish? Kelp? Ha. You wish.”

“You know, that has never been a wish of mine.”

“You never wished for a squish?”

Virgil’s look could have quelled SharkBert. Gordon hastily bent down to the bag again.

“Aaand – I brought supper!” He pulled out some mussels and held them triumphantly up for his brother’s inspection.

And that did bring a considered nod.

“Okay, that one I give you. Where did you find these?”

“Oh, down that way. There’s an inlet. Thousands of ‘em, many as we can eat.”

Virgil was frowning again. 

“You’ve got a lot there – they won’t keep, will they?”

“Nope, not for too long out of water, but I figured – use that magic firestick of yours and make another pool near the shelter, fill it with seawater, we’ve got our very own little rock-pool for keeping mussels fresh in.”

“Huh.” Virgil turned back towards their shelter, kelp in hand, the frown still on his face. “I guess we could at that.”

He didn’t immediately follow. Gordon watched Virgil walk away from him, his brother’s shoulders hunched slightly, and suddenly an understanding of exactly what he’d been doing that afternoon came to him. He’d set off to fill that bag with something to make Virgil smile. And somehow, despite toes and kelp and seals and sharks and mussels, he hadn’t managed it. 

“You coming?”

His fault they were here, after all. One job. Keep his ‘bird intact, keep her on course. He couldn’t blame Virgil.

He had to work harder. Just sew those bells on his feet, just let him dance a bit higher, smile a bit wider. They’d get there. 

Hey nonny fucking nonny.


	6. Storm within

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The effects of concussion are taking Virgil to a dark place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Virgil, Jim, but not as we know him.

By the evening of day four, a great bruise of cloud spread across the horizon to the west, purple and black and green. It oozed threat, as if it was sucking up the energy of the sea beneath it in order to create destruction for those in its path.

Virgil stood at the top of the southern hill and watched it coming, watched as the horizon was menacingly shortened by the dense cloud swallowing it into its darkness, and felt his own inner darkness flow out to meet it.

The burgeoning cloud mass ate the sun, extinguishing its brightness but allowing a weird, flattened light to filter through underneath and render everything in sharp relief; each blade of grass, each gull heading home to the cliffs, even Gordon as he dragged some kind of salvage back down the northern hill from the ruined lighthouse. 

He didn’t know why Gordon bothered. There was nothing useful left there. From this distance it looked like his brother was bringing some long thin piece of tattered metal, and Virgil felt that surge of irritation flood his body again. Gordon was wasting energy and time collecting scrap, while he, Virgil, had spent the afternoon properly digging out the latrine with a sheared off section of his salvaged metal sheet, even as his head screamed at him, as his back gripped and twisted and clawed at him. 

Now as he waited for the approaching storm, he guessed all his work was for nothing. The ominous size and shape of the clouds, the speed of its approach, suggested a conflagration that would damned near wipe them off the face of the island itself, let alone his paltry little trench.

Even as he resented the imbalance of effort between them, one part of him was simply grateful that Gordon and his constant chatter had decided to head off somewhere other than Virgil’s general vicinity. He’d once marvelled at Gordon’s cheerfulness in the face of the kinds of adversity most sane people fled screaming from. Now he began to wonder if that cheerfulness wasn’t a sign of complete self-absorption. A solipsism taken to extraordinary lengths - I’m okay, so who gives a shit about the rest of the world?

Perhaps that wasn’t fair. But the truth was he felt alone in his abiding anxiety – for the two of them, for his family, for the state of the planet. The imbalance of effort was just one thing that was off-centre and out of tune. Gordon’s seeming immunity to it should have countered his own fear, as it had done in the past; instead, it made Virgil’s isolation one of the spirit, too.

He watched as the light blurred and smudged, as the lines of the waves became obscured and lost beneath the oncoming tempest. Time to get inside, get secured.

Only Gordon was stopped by the gravestones, eyes shaded, looking the other way out to sea.

Well, great. Had he even noticed the weather?

“Gordon! Come on!”

He could read Gordon’s reluctance in the vague wave of acknowledgement, and the way he slowly trudged toward their hut, still watching the eastward side of the island and the water beyond.

At this rate, his brother was going to get a North Sea storm dumped on him.

Even as he thought that, and even as the storm was still several kilometres away, a brilliant flash ripped through the sky. Immediately, a crack like the doors of hell opening roared through the air around him, the soil and rock beneath him. 

At least it got Gordon running. Awkwardly, with that damned length of metal flailing behind him, until common sense kicked in and he dropped it to the ground.

“Did you see that?” he panted as he drew nearer.

“See it? I felt it. We need to be inside, now.”

A sparky, metallic smell filled the air, and Gordon sniffed appreciatively.

“Grade A ozone. Man, I think it hit the lighthouse.”

“Not much to wreck there,” Virgil said, climbing over the stones surrounding their home. He scooped up a large handful of mussels from their artificial rock-pool against the wall and ducked down under their door-blanket with them. A last look showed him a pall of rain advancing across the waves.

“What Scott started, Thor finished. Wow, here it comes!” Even Gordon hurried to stoop down and come in behind Virgil. He turned to put the stone against the corner of the space blanket, wedging it tight against the wall, before taking off his helmet.

“At least you had the sense to leave that hunk of junk outside.” Virgil dropped the mussels into the pannikin and followed suit in taking off his helmet, freeing his head from what always seemed so heavy lately.

“Junk? How dare you. That’s top quality scrap metal.” Gordon smirked, one eyebrow lifted. In the semi darkness, the expression was Mephistophelean. “I have great plans for that. And for one of those metal rods you stole from the Scottish government.”

“Hmm. Do I dare ask?”

”You can ask, but I ain’t gonna tell you about the rod yet. The other one though – I figured, I’ll take the fishing line and work out some kind of weave, make a net. I’ll bend that old metal into the frame.”

Usually, Gordon’s schemes provided Virgil with a kind of detached amusement. They were never worth getting wound up about, and as long as he could avoid being the target of any nonsense, Virgil could enjoy Gordon’s more ingenious efforts. Like the time he figured out how to set a remote controlled mechanical bird flapping at the window five minutes before meals were to be served, distracting Grandma and allowing Alan to swap out her cooking for something store bought on the mainland and extracted from the freezer. It took Grandma over a week to rumble that one.

But now they were simply tiresome. The sense of futility that dogged him ever since they’d arrived on this godforsaken rock meant he lacked the energy to engage with them, and just hearing the inane chatter had his teeth grinding in annoyance.

“What is the point of a net?”

Gordon looked at him strangely. 

“I guess – to keep up my butterfly collection? What do you think I’d use a net for?”

“Did you even bother to test the metal? It looked as rusty as hell, there’s no way it would take any kind of stress.”

“Not like you, hey,” Gordon muttered. Virgil ignored him, instead starting the chemical cooker and putting the pannikin on top of it.

Gordon kept going. He was either stupid, bored, or suicidal.

“I figure I’ll need to attach the line in strips to something, maybe secure each one under a rock, then weave it cross-ways. Should be able to knot together something useful. Even if the metal won’t work as a frame.”

“Do you realise how big you’d have to make a throw net? In this kind of sea?”

“Yeah. It’s gonna take a lot of line, I know, but –“

“Which will make it heavy and awkward and just about unusable.”

“Fine.” Well, look, a flash of Gordon temper. Good. The Mister Sunshine act was wearing extremely thin. “Guess I’ll go with plan B.”

Another enormous crack sounded nearby, a flash of light, and at once a deafening roar of wind swept over their hill, snapping at the edges of the blanket until it tore free from the stone at its base.

Gordon jumped forward and replaced the stone, putting his hands against the edge of the blanket. It bucked and flapped like a live thing, cold air shooting through the gaps like icy daggers aimed at hands and faces.

“Damn. This one’s a doozy.”

“Just – hold onto that door.”

“Yeah, well, newsflash, Virgil, it’s not a door, it’s a piece of material, and it’s not in a cooperative mood.” With his mouth twisted in the shape it always got when he was concentrating, Gordon started piling things against the blanket – first his helmet, then Virgil’s, then the dead radio beacon. The extra height went some way towards stopping the worst of the flapping.

“There. Done.” The smile was back, as cheerful and fake as Moon Rock Candy. “I am now ready for my meal at Casa De Tracy, where seafood is our specialty and it’s not just the waiters who have mussels. With a double ess. Instead of muscles. Get it?”

Virgil said nothing. They were in an enclosed space, with nowhere to go. There was no point in telling Gordon exactly what he thought of his awful jokes.

Instead, he asked, “What had you so fascinated out there that you could ignore a damned hurricane coming up at you from the west?”

”Hmm? Oh, yeah, that. Funniest thing.” Gordon’s face grew animated at the thought.

“I sincerely doubt it,” muttered Virgil under his breath.

“I coulda sworn I heard a plane? Off in the distance, but not a jet, something – like an old propeller type plane.”

Heavily, Virgil said, “A plane.”

“Yeah, you know – one of those old ones, an old crop duster or something. Remember that vintage thing Ed McAllister had, back in Coniston?”

“A crop duster?”

“Well… yeah? Kinda? But stronger.”

“In the North Sea?”

“Yeah, okay.” The light died out in Gordon’s eyes. “I was probably imagining it. I get it.”

I did that, Virgil thought, and there was neither shame nor satisfaction, only a sense of inevitability.

Nothing good, nothing living, lingered here for long.

The rain must have been coming down in raging swirls, because every now and then it would blatter against the blanket. A puddle formed beneath the bottom edge, which Virgil methodically pushed back whenever it extended towards the cooker.

Their little home was as chilly as the mood.

Sighing, Gordon brought his knees up and put his chin on them thoughtfully. It was obvious he was about to start another foray towards forced cheeriness.

“You know what I really miss right now?”

“Tracy Island?”

“Oh, I mean, yeah. Of course. No, wait, I should have said – you know what I wish for, right now, on a plate to eat?”

Virgil glared. “Is this a good fantasy to be having? We’ve got mussels for supper.”

“Mmm. Bi-valve burgers. Without the bun. Or the relish. But with added kelp.”

Virgil waved his hand in weary invitation. “Go on. What do you wish you had to eat?”

“Fish tacos!” Gordon said triumphantly, lifting his head. The blanket flapped wildly against the rock holding it down as a sudden gust threatened to tear it open, but Gordon continued, undistracted. “Used to get them on the beach in SD. The softest tortillas, the crunchiest samphire, fried and really bitey, and then wham, the fish, caught that morning off the coast. All melt in your mouth and all crunch and softness, like putting the beach in your mouth and biting down.”

“Okay. Good to know.” Virgil massaged his forehead, considering the paracetamol again. Maybe just a couple? Just for an hour of relief from this pain.

His brother put his head back on his knees again, his eyes downcast. The wind screeched outside, a devil’s lament, and Virgil thought briefly of an old fashioned plane out there, being torn apart by the gods of the sky.

He lifted up the pannikin with the boiled mussels in it. “In the meantime, we have sautéed mussels in a North Sea sauce.”

“Oooh, yummy.” But Gordon’s heart wasn’t in it, and Virgil thought, an effort. Make an effort.

“You know what I’ve been thinking while you had your sordid little taco fantasy?”

“That being a contestant in Survivor: Orkney Islands ain’t what it’s cracked up to be?”

“Maybe we should put that SOS up after all.”

It was a plan, something to do, and it sparked a renewed hint of interest in Gordon.

“You know, I think we should.”

“Well, tomorrow I’ll get onto that.”

“Huh.” Gordon shivered, a little theatrically, but Virgil could see a truth in there, too. “If the island’s still standing tomorrow.”

There was nothing to say to that, so Virgil contented himself with stirring the mussels, using a wrench from one of his uniform compartments. Another slash of rain against the door, billowing it inwards, and Gordon shifted the helmets and radio again, bringing the fit tighter to the wall. He cleared his throat.

“I’ve been wondering…”

The thunder was somehow inside Virgil’s own head, relentless, pulsating against his skull with every beat of his miserable heart. It took a lot to simply say, “What?”

“About the whammy. I mean, what caused it? How did it affect some things and not others?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you gotta have some thoughts, right? That big old Mr Fix-it brain of yours must have been noodling over this ever since we stepped on Fantasy Island.”

“Is that what this is to you?” Whip-like, vicious, and he felt as much as saw Gordon flinch in response.

“No, of course not. I just thought – “

“I don’t know, okay? Leave it.”

Gordon went still, in the way he did when he was injured, when he was hurt.

“I know, I just thought – “

“Just – don’t.”

Another patch of no talking, if not exactly quiet, given the raging weather beyond their burrow. Their barrow. Now it was Virgil’s turn to shiver.

“Here. These are ready. You take first turn.”

Wordlessly, Gordon reached for the pannikin, carefully lifting out one of the mussels, now opened in the heat, and scooping out the flesh. Another one, then he passed it back.  
“Not really hungry.”

So blatant a lie was annoying beyond words, but Virgil bit back his first response, born as much of worry as it was irritation. He took out a mussel of his own, and tried it. Even without any garnish but the salt in the seawater, it was very good. 

He was the elder brother here. Time for another effort.

When did being nice require an effort?

“I guess I have been doing some thinking.”

Gordon stared moodily at the ground, flicking the empty mussel shell over and over on his knuckles.

“About what?”

“About the whammy that hit us.”

“And did your thinking come to any startling conclusions?” There was a snide tone in Gordon’s voice that met something alike in Virgil. He resisted the call, kept his voice neutral.  
“Well, not so much conclusions as conjectures. I was thinking terellium alloy.”

Gordon frowned at him.

“The stuff Dad and Brains developed? Okay. I’ll bite.”

“Dad and Brains were always aware of the danger of a solar flare, so everything we have is EMF proofed from the design stage. The chemical combustion engines shouldn’t have been affected by a normal EMF.”

“True.”

“Everything that died on board our ‘birds had terellium alloy in it. Our comms, our engines. The radio beacon. TA is super conductive, near indestructible, you know Dad made a second fortune with it. The only things in our ‘birds that didn’t have it in them were the batteries and my laser, because Brains hasn’t gotten around to changing out the old to use terellium in them.”

“This is true. So not a garden variety EMF then?”

Virgil shook his head, slowly, and regretted the immediate doubling of the pain there.

“It is also true that everything that got drained was on at the time – including our wrist comms and the engine in Four. So question one is how did the batteries in Four get so drained?”

“That’s easy. The engine is designed to draw on the battery as back up in the case of catastrophic power loss. Was lucky in a way that the shutdown was so fast that the engine didn’t have the chance to drain the lot. It would have taken a huge gulp outta the battery straight away.”

“Was a good thing the batteries in Two were offline.”

Gordon spared him a slow blink.

“Amen, brother.” He sat quietly for a moment, then coughed and said, brightly, “So that’s all good then?”

“What’s ‘all good’?”

A hand wave. “About Scott and Johnny?”

The pressure to yell at his clueless brother began to build again in Virgil’s head.

“How do you figure that?”

“Not a world-wide catastrophe. Just a localised weapon from a criminal mastermind in a kilt. Scooter and J-bird are fine.”

“That’s what you think?” And Virgil couldn’t help the sarcasm, the intentional emphasis on the word ‘think’.

Gordon was still again, a rabbit crouching in the vain hope of escaping a predator.

“What’s the first thing John would do when we disappeared off the radar?” Heavy silence answered Virgil, with the storm adding a nice touch of apocalyptic chorus to the scene. He continued, as merciless as the weather. “He’d call up Scott, tell him what happened. Scott would be back on site in less than an hour. What are the odds of him being targeted by exactly the same thing that got us?”

For once, there was no comeback, and if there was some kind of painful victory in that, Virgil would take it. He kept going, relentless.

“And why would it be localised? Why not take down everything? You were old enough to remember the '48 Flux Wave.”

“Yeah.” Hard to tell what Gordon was thinking now; he had adopted that smooth tone he did when he wanted to keep his thoughts from his brothers. “I remember – well, not ‘remember’ remember, I just know Mom was really worried because Dad was flying over to Osaka and she didn’t know if he’d made it before the Wave hit. And then I remember him being stranded for about three months. Four?”

“All down to one man and his ability to attack the K-X in every machine on the planet.”

A long, ugly silence.

“So – you’re thinking it could be another Lou Woodley?”

“Maybe.”

“But Brains and Dad figured out the Anti-Flux Capacitator.”

“And what makes you think someone else couldn’t figure out a way to attack that, too?’

“I don’t.” But it was a defensive whine; Gordon had always been oddly protective of Brains. “It’s just crazy. Woodley was the worst mass murder in history, you think someone else is going to try to top that?”

“I don’t know what to think, and neither do you. Which was kinda my point.” Virgil took another mussel, swallowed it. “We can speculate all we like, won’t change the fact that Two is under 300 meters of water and Four is illegally parked on a reef.”

“No. But that doesn’t mean we can’t survive until someone does come by. And you know they will.”

“Glass half full, huh. Too bad if there isn’t even a glass there to begin with.”

And Gordon was doing it again, looking at him with – what, pity? Pity, from a guy with a degree in marine biology, softest science possible, hell, Alan could have knocked that over in middle school. From a guy who couldn’t even pilot his own ‘bird, crashed it like a rube when all he had to do was steer the damn thing upwards, for god’s sake. Virgil felt his hands tighten into fists. The urge to knock that expression off his brother’s face was overwhelming.

And that realisation hit him with more force than he would ever expend on his brother.

What the hell was wrong with him? 

This wasn’t him, this wasn’t who he was.

It was frightening to feel such a stranger in his own body.

Frightening to feel so little control, so much anger and malice and desire to hurt.

And disgust. With himself, with Gordon, with this claustrophobic little tomb they called their hut, their shelter, Christ, their home base.

If he thought it would help, he would pull back the feeble attempt at rigging a door and just walk out into the storm, right off the cliff edge, no great loss.

Maybe that was where his true self really was, out there alone in the storm with just his grief for company. Maybe he died in the crash. Maybe he drowned in the sea, that cold blackness that devoured everything before filling the hollow shell that remained.

Maybe he was already a ghost of Rona, and this was hell. 

Even as he thought it, Gordon was opening his mouth again.

“You’ll feel better in the morning. You just need a decent sleep. Don’t think I don’t know you’ve been sleeping with one eye open.”

”’M fine.” It was as much as he could bring himself to say, and even then it came through gritted teeth, but clueless Gordon didn’t read what he was sending.

“I can take watch tonight. If you think we need to.”

“And what makes you think that would be any kind of comfort to me?”

Boom. Direct hit, at last. He could see the temper rising in his brother’s face, he could almost feel the effort it took for him not to snarl.

He could hear the level of increased breathing from the other side of the hut as Gordon swallowed his first response.

“Okay. Whatever.” His brother shimmied around until he could wriggle backwards into the FBS. “You stay awake and think happy thoughts for both of us.”

Virgil watched him settle down, his head resting on tensed shoulders so different from his usual relaxed sleeping position.

It was pointless looking for his own sleep yet. Not with Gordon lying stiff and unhappy beside him. Give the guy a half hour though, he’d be gone. Nothing stayed for long in that mind.

Dammit. 

There was that ugliness again.

Maybe it was just sleep he needed. Maybe once his head stopped pounding, just for a minute, he’d find his way back to being the person he thought he remembered.

But sleep was an illusory peace, at best. Every morning on this island, Virgil woke through an overpowering sense of dread that resolved itself into an image of Scott falling like a missile into the earth, Thunderbird One acting like the streamlined creature of speed it was, taking Scott helplessly downward to impact at a thousand kilometres an hour in a ball of flame and sound and death. And the mental picture of Thunderbird Five pinwheeling downwards as gravity caught it and tugged it towards the planet to burn like a giant firework against the evening sky, John trapped inside, helpless as he watched his fate loom ever larger beneath his feet.

Every day it was these images that churned through his near-empty stomach, even before he opened his eyes, before thought had properly coalesced into his brain. Those images, setting his internal thermostat for the day at zero.

Nothing in the bitter, petty little evening of this day promised him anything better if he closed his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Concussion can have terrible effects on people's personalities. For me, it was several days of disconnection, an inability to feel the world around me was real. For another friend of mine, one of he most agreeable and affable people I know, it was a week of snarling and sniping that left his girlfriend in bewildered tears, and him just as bewildered when he recovered. Concussion doesn't play fair.


	7. Sea Saw

He woke slowly. It was always Virgil’s routine to take stock of the world before he stirred himself to any kind of action, working methodically through his mind the detritus of the day before and the demands of the day to come. He noted he was warm enough, or at least, as warm as the IR suit could manage to maintain for him, his face cradled in his arms so that the cold and damp didn’t reach it. His back still felt stiff. His feet felt a little less bruised today. The wind had died down, back to normal levels on North Rona Island. They were still in their shelter. Well, no; Gordon wasn’t beside him.

That was a good thing, wasn’t it? He was angry with him, after all. Gordon had been unforgivably selfish and stupid, conjuring up a deep and justified contempt in Virgil. Hadn’t he? 

It was strange, this insistence that he should be furious, and yet somehow the charge lacked any kind of substance. That bilious, amorphous anger consuming him last night was gone, only the vague memory of it lingering, a kind of stain in his mind.

There was John and Scott. That was a constant, that gripping worry in his belly. Please be okay, guys. Please just be. 

But something else felt different, and the realisation came as such a profound surprise that he held his breath after a sudden intake.

For the first time since they’d reached the island, his head didn’t feel as if it were about to split open. The sickening, wicked pain had dulled to a slow thump in the front of his head, and that caused him to at last let out his breath in one long sigh of relief. Everything was easier to cope with when his head wasn’t coming off with every heartbeat. He was still tired, an endless exhaustion born of every kind of stress. And his head was still hurting, a pulsing pain in his forehead – but it was a snare drum tap compared to the kettle drums that had pounded in his brain since the crash.

Astonishing how much better he felt, and he didn’t dare move in case anything he did changed it.

So, sit-rep recap; feeling better, still on cold, wet Rona, still worried. Still angry? Not quite. But something was still off-balance. Maybe he needed food? Ha. That was the other constant.

He flexed his shoulders slightly, sensing something else missing. Maybe it was just the feel of Gordon’s body next to his.

He heard the flap being pushed open, and felt the gust of cold that swept in with it. 

“He’s awake. Brrr. Icy out there, mud puddle in here.”

And that voice tapped into something from the night before, some odd mix of hostility and wretchedness. If he couldn’t find it in him to be angry with Gordon, could he be irritated instead? In the face of ongoing worry and pain and awful, relentless bad weather, could he at least allow himself to be driven slowly and surely up the wall by the awful, relentless Gordon-ness of Gordon? 

An internal double-take; since when had he thought of Gordon as awful?

“Cold enough for you?”

Virgil groaned. His head stayed buried in his arms, the energy to raise it lost to him. 

“Hey, Virge, you’ll never guess what the weather is doing.”

A grunt.

“Wow. Psychic, huh? Yep, it’s raining. I give it 8 out of 10 on the Seattle scale of shittiness, though – there’s a few more degrees of force before it hits water jet level.”

Virgil stayed silent, in the hope of encouraging the same from his little brother. He needed a moment, just a minute or two, to straighten out the conflicting narratives in his head – the certainty of yesterday against the guilty memory of a very different way of being.

“So – plans for today? A stroll around the park? Lunch by the beach? Trip to Scott’s lighthouse improvement program?”

He buried his head further.

“I’ve been thinking.”

Virgil said nothing. To his surprise, Gordon did the same. A full minute went by, then another.

It was more irritating than the babble.

“What?” He raised his head and glared at Gordon, to find Gordon grinning like a shark.

“Aw, there he is. Ain’t he cute?”

“Arggh.” Virgil flopped back down, his head tilted so he could glare at his brother.

“Yep, I’ve been thinking. And working. Plan B. Guess what I made in school today.”

“Gordon…”

“Hmm?” All innocent and sweet, as if he didn’t know he was working on Virgil’s last nerve.

“Just – get to the point.”

Gordon twisted his face in a parody of thought.

“No, you know what? You don’t deserve to know. I think I’m just going to go and do what I’m going to do and you can stay there working on bringing your grump factor to asshole level.”

“Then just do it! Just stop being so goddamned annoying!”

“Moi?” Gordon reached down and grabbed at Virgil’s shoulder to wriggle it; Virgil flicked his hand away.

“Whoa. Think you need another nap.” In one fluid movement Gordon rose from his crouch. The fact he didn’t hit his head on the low roof just irritated Virgil more.

“I need – some time. On my own.”

“Done. I’ll be back in a bit. Hey, look at that.” Gordon stuck his head past the emergency blanket door. “Still raining. Who’da thunk it?”

“Goodbye, Gordon.”

“I’m going. Off to have fun while you stay there being Grunty Flannel Man. Horizontally. Anyone ever tell you you’re just so damned versatile?”

“Fuck off, Gordon.”

He could just about hear the smug expression on Gordon’s face as he reattached the blanket behind him.

He stayed, head down, his body tense, his mind more than a little confused. He felt as though he’d been following a script, written by someone who didn’t know them. What the hell had just happened?

Inside their earthen shelter the sounds from the island were largely muffled. Even the rain didn’t strike the blanket door. Virgil drifted in and out of sleep, craving the energy, the drive he knew he once had. After half an hour in the near silence, he sat up and looked morosely towards where Gordon had disappeared. 

What the hell was he up to? How much trouble could he get himself into on a deserted island, anyway?

Plenty, his big brother brain told him, and with that, and an untranslatable but readily understood expression of extreme annoyance, he pulled himself from out of their shared sleeping shelter and did the half-crouch walk to the entrance that the low ceiling demanded of him.

And as he did so, something else occurred to him. 

Ever since the moment Two hit the water – hell, no, before that. In the cockpit, free-falling, instruments dead. It was ever since those nightmarish seconds as he looked across at his little brother and thought he was going to watch him die. Something had taken hold of him, some kind of overwhelming dread, a sense that everything they did, every moment of striving for survival, of cheating death, was futile. But now, as he was about to set out into the fifth morning on Rona, that heavy cloak of hopelessness had somehow lifted from him. It was the weight of that dread, or lack of it, he’d missed as he lay in the FSB.

That kind of weight would always throw a plane’s alignment out of whack.

Maybe, just maybe, he was finding his balance again.

Outside it was raining as Gordon had said, as it had done every day since their arrival. Gusts of stinging, angled rain that never seemed to stop on this godforsaken rock. Wearily he replaced his helmet on his head. Survival 101, maintain body temperature. It was a relief from the attack of water, but the sound of the showers hitting the Perspex in a monotonous drumming brought its own kind of pressure.

There was no sign of Gordon.

Instantly, a tingle of alarm started in the base of his spine.

It was one he immediately squashed; in this rain visibility was limited to less than a hundred metres. But not knowing where his brother was brought an echo of annoyance. It was so irresponsible to wander off, no matter how small the island was. Where the hell was he supposed to start looking for him?

Survival 101 part two; don’t waste energy. And yet that was exactly what Gordon would have him do, go looking for him in shitty weather with no clue as to which direction he’d gone…

But then, his inner voice told him, there was likely to be only one place Gordon would go. The nearest access point to the sea was the tiny gully where they’d washed up. If Gordon was doing something unbelievably stupid – oh, come on, why use ‘if’? – that was where he’d be.

Grumbling to himself, and hearing the faint echo in the helmet, Virgil stomped south towards the gully.

It was even more exposed as he climbed higher on the hill behind their ruin, before his path dipped downwards again into the depression that lead to the shale and black-pebbled beach. As he got near the point where the rocks allowed for a relatively easy climb downwards, he glanced out to sea, to where the great shifting mass of kelp swayed in the constant currents that swirled about the island. A seal bobbed about near the edge of it, and then one of its limbs lifted up in a straight line and began waving to him.

It wasn’t a seal; it was Gordon.

“No!”

He began to barrel downwards but then stopped himself; he could see better from here, exposed to the rain and wind but with a clear view to the kelp bed, sixty metres out to sea.

“Gordon! You stupid, irresponsible – stupid damn stupid idiot!”

Gordon, the lunatic, waved again, and then did the one thing designed to destroy every ounce of Virgil’s calm; he disappeared.

Everything in Virgil’s body constricted. He made a movement forward and then froze, trapped in a moment of fight or flight when the threat was nowhere near him and there was nothing he could do to counter it anyway.

And that thought was wrong, because the threat was aimed at his very soul. If Gordon disappeared, that would be the end of him, too.

It wasn’t the banality of his last words to his brother; how many other people had cause to regret the last thing they’d said to someone they loved? So commonplace, so cruel. That would be a never-ending source of pain, of course it would. 

It was the fact that he’d failed, spectacularly, to Keep An Eye On Gordon. That injunction handed to him almost casually, a kind of daily ritual, by first his mother, then his father, and then Scott. It was the undiscussed but always understood ruling parameter of Tracy brother life, that of all of them, it was Gordon who needed a leash, preferably leg-irons, in order to stave off the undertaking of something incredibly mischievous, stupid, dangerous, or all three.

He realised his breathing sounded in his helmet as though he’d climbed a mountain, not a slight incline. All he could do was strain towards the edge of the kelp bed, staring, waiting for the reappearance of the idiotic brother who owned his heart as he’d always done.

Occasionally something would break the surface near the kelp, and that heart would thump. All too often it was simply a wave, curling outward in such a way that it resembled the back of a fish, the stroke of a limb. In his darkest moments, the dorsal of a shark. Minutes went by, and the next flood of fear came as he thought, maybe he was sucked under? Maybe that wasn’t a wave of ‘look at me being clever’, maybe it was ‘help me, I’m trapped’?

Work the problem. Gordon could breathe for hours under there. The oxygen tanks he had helped to design, first at WASP, then with Brain’s improvements, would scrub the carbon dioxide and recycle the oxygen almost perpetually – or at least, far beyond his foreseeable needs in this scenario. He wouldn’t drown.

His suit would maintain homeostasis for many hours, too. So really, Virgil only needed to worry if Gordon was gone for – what, two hours? Three? There would be no need for him to be down there for more than that, would there? He’d be back up sooner than that, right? How long had it been anyway?

Virgil was blessed with a good sense of time, and he estimated half an hour, perhaps forty minutes since Gordon had left the shelter.

There! He peered harder, even as the rain decided to slash more furiously onto his helmet. Something in the kelp bed, surely? Something large and dark, pushing up between two long strands of thick kelp – 

And his stomach turned over. In his worst nightmares, this would be front and centre. Maybe it was a dolphin, maybe some kind of large fish? But the hammering in his throat just said one thing, over and over; shark, shark, shark.

That was it. He was going in. No idea what he would do or how it would help, but in a sense, it didn’t matter. If Gordon was in trouble then so was he. Simple as that.

He hurried to the head of the gully – and stopped abruptly. 

Clambering over the last of the rocks before hooking his foot and pushing up to join him on the turf was Gordon.

Before Virgil’s mind could even switch gear from terror to relief, his brother was pushing past him.

“Don’t! Not a word.” Gordon had some kind of jerry-rigged spear in one hand and two large fish in his other.

“Gordon, you- “

The look on Gordon’s face stopped him in his tracks.

“I’m so mad right now.”

If he’d wanted, on some level, to see Gordon’s cheerfulness brought down just a little, he had it in the set of his brother’s mouth, the hardness of those brown eyes. Be careful what you wish for, he thought, but it was a sing-song of pure happiness, almost light-headed as he was with the simple fact that Gordon was on land and out of the water and in front of him and safe. Safe.

That same safe little brother was storming past him, head down, the fish slapping heavily against his leg. Virgil was so wrong-footed it took him a moment before he turned on his heel and started after him, trying to hear what his brother was muttering.

“Stupid. Stupid!”

Well, that was something Virgil could get behind.

“I was so mad at you I forgot the basics of diving. Should have told you where I was, should have told you how long I’d be.”

“Wait.” Virgil reached forward and grabbed Gordon’s arm, only to be abruptly brushed off. “You were mad at me?”

“Yes, I was mad at you, god. Who wouldn’t be?”

“Mad at me?”

Gordon stopped. The rain ran down his helmet, making his face wobble in the streams of water.

“Is that so hard to understand? Or, wait, perfect Virgil can be a goddam unrelenting asshole in a confined space for days and still get to claim high moral ground. That how it works?”

“I’ve been an asshole?”

“Nothing but. Streaming live right from your dumb fundamental orifice.”

Gordon stomped away from him again, and Virgil followed.

“I don’t care, Gordon. I’m just happy you’re okay. There was something in the water that I – “

Gordon whirled again.

“There’s always something in the water. Newsflash – we’re gonna starve here if we don’t get in the water. Can’t get at the seals from up top, and those rookeries are gonna be an absolute pain in the butt to climb up to, so yeah. Collecting mussels and spearfishing it is.”

“Well, why didn’t you talk to me about it?”

“Yeah, I know, already said it was stupid. But you’re driving me up the wall, and I – “

Conflicting narratives. Certainty of yesterday, meet confusion of today. “Oh, no. No, you are the one who never shuts up. You’re the one who just won’t let anything go, who always has to do a happy little song and dance routine over every little thing.”

Gordon waved his arms towards him in incredulous anger, which made the fish swing wildly and almost hit him in the face.

“As compared to sitting around wringing your hands every minute of the day? And night, too, god you grind your teeth like nothing on earth. Demented castanets in my ear all night long. And then I get to spend the day with someone who looks like he’s about to burst into tears any second, and just because I try to cheer him up, he accuses me of being too fucking happy. Second newsflash – it’s not all that easy to stay positive with a wet blanket the size of a Sasquatch sitting on your lap in the dark!”

“Okay. Fine.” In some part of his mind, Virgil was aware that they were standing in the rain on top of a tiny islet, arguing. The level of absurdity was off the charts, but it felt so good just to vent the feelings he’d kept tight to himself in the interests of survival. “I guess the fact that Scott could be –“

“Scott could be sitting by the pool with a margarita for all we know!”

“He could be dead!”

They stared at each other, chests heaving, both angry and afraid and unhappy.

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Hard to tell with the Happy Gordon Show playing daily.”

The rain drummed, unfaltering. Gordon half-turned away from him, staring past him to the gray sea, blowing his breath out.

At last, he shook his head.

“Forget it. Just – here. Figure out some way to cook these, will you?” He threw the fish to Virgil, who caught them easily. “Or dig up some soy sauce, we’ll have sushi.”

He turned and left Virgil then, and Virgil let him go.  
 


	8. Two if by Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coming back together, at last.

In the afternoon, astonishingly, the rain stopped.

There wasn’t much in the way of sun, but the relief from the constant downpour felt better than it probably should. The fact of being able to take off the helmet to allow the wind through his hair was probably ridiculous in the way it made him feel better.

Virgil sat outside on a ruined wall and cooked one of the fish lightly in the pannikin from the survival pack, set on top of the chemical cooker. When each piece was done he collected all of it and set off to where he could see Gordon sitting halfway up the slope to the north of their camp.

He sat down beside Gordon and looked out to where he was watching so intently. To him the sea was just a gray-green mass, patterns forming and dissipating without meaning, lifting and rising in ways he found unpredictable. There was something mesmerising in the surge and fall, he supposed, but it was just as fascinating for him, the inveterate people-watcher, to steal glances at Gordon’s face. There was a kind of restfulness in it that was so rare on his ever-busy little brother – almost a dreaminess as Gordon’s eyes followed the scattered lines of foam. After a while it seemed to Virgil that Gordon’s breathing was somehow synchronous with the waves, his chest lifting and subsiding with the huge sinuous swell of the sea before them.

“She’s moody today,” Gordon said suddenly. He pointed with his chin, his eyes never leaving the water. “You see how the big drop at the back of the surf sucks the surge back, how she kind of lifts over the top and then drops back down? Like one big S shape – “ He lifted his hand and demonstrated. “She’s not committing to coming in hard, but she’s not happy about it, so the water just there – “ he pointed to where it looked to Virgil like a flat space between action, where circles were forming and bursting on the surface like flattened fireworks – “that’s a killer spot. That’s where she’s showing her real thoughts.”

The fact that he was speaking so calmly meant that a truce was on the table. Virgil responded in kind, keeping his tone light.

“You know, a Freudian would have a lot to say about the fact that you call the water you love going in to ‘she’,” Virgil said.

“Freud. Really? He’s a dud.” Gordon spared him a raised eyebrow.

“Just a bit cliché, that’s all.” Virgil shrugged. “The whole unpredictable woman thing.”

“That’s not – it’s not her unpredictability that makes her a she. It’s because she’s the mother of us all. She’s where we began, where everything began, all life. And – I don’t know. We’re like the land, we keep trying to change her or conquer her or whatever, all, you know, bigger, tougher, stronger, we’ll beat her. And she lets us go, and she lets us try, and then she’ll just tear us apart because this is her planet and sometimes we need to be put back in our place.”

All Virgil’s earlier confused irritation melted away. Gordon could do that to him, he thought. Be the most superficial brat on the planet one minute and then turn around and show him a kind of poetry.

He shouldn’t be surprised. He’d long been aware that the three middle brothers were the ones who truly cared about music, and somehow that connected to the soul. Scott liked something he could tap his feet to, something with a strong beat that could pound in time with his own enormous heart. And Alan liked anything loud – pure energy, something that could both be and generate noise as Alan flailed about in his own version of body slam boogie.

But John, Gordon and he – for them, music was something else, a pathway to the numinous. He felt it now, watching as Gordon breathed with the sea, taking in and giving out a kind of love Virgil could never share but for which he had endless empathy. He’d seen the same kind of rapt attention on John’s face as he stared into the Horsehead nebula, or listened to Karinyov for the first time.

They sat in silence for several minutes, the sea dancing before them, a place of quietness between them. Then Virgil stirred.

“Brought lunch.” He offered the pannikin to Gordon, whose eyes lit up when they stopped staring at the water and saw cooked fish for the first time in almost a week. He didn’t waste time answering, just grabbed a piece of it and began chewing enthusiastically.

“Oh, that’s good,” he sighed as he finished. Virgil ate his own piece slowly, trying to make it last, even as everything in him demanded he inhale it as fast as Gordon had done.   
He waited until Gordon had taken a second piece before saying, “You did good.”

“No.” Gordon bit the fish piece in two and shook his head. His blond hair was matted from wearing the helmet so much. “I did stupid.”

“True.” Virgil nibbled at the fish, astonished at how good it tasted. Food fresh from the sea meets a hungry belly, he guessed. “You don’t do that again. I was worried sick.”

“Aw.” Gordon gave the first hint of a smile he’d seen since this morning. “But that’s your superpower. Anxiety Man.”

“And what are you? Couldn’t give a shit boy?” The second he said it, he regretted it as being far too harsh, but to his surprise, Gordon’s grin grew.

“Ah, there’s the bitter resentment I’ve grown to know and love. Face it, Virgil; you wish you were half as together as I am.”

Before Virgil could respond, Gordon put a hand on his arm.

“Virge, I know about Scott. And John. The thought of something happening to them just freaks me out, okay? You’re not the only one. But there’s nothing we can do, is there? So why stew about it?”

Virgil stared at him.

“It’s that easy for you?”

“I guess? I put it in my too-hard basket.”

He didn’t know whether to be filled with admiration or bewilderment. How could Gordon just do that?

“I’m not…” Gordon paused, biting his lower lip. “I’m not brave like you. Or Scott. Or Kayo. Hell, Johnny and Alan, too.”

Virgil frowned. This was absurd.

“Gordon, you go into dangerous situations all the time! Don’t sit there and tell me you’re not brave. I won’t listen to anyone run down my brothers – not even my brothers!”

But Gordon was shaking his head. “No, you don’t get it. I really don’t – you remember that other time when Thunderbird Two lost power, when that jerk Fischler had the runaway balloon, when I flew back in underneath?”

“Remember it?” That was worth a glare. “You saved my life, you moron. Of course I remember it.”

“Oh. Right. Huh.” Gordon gave a ghost of a chuckle. “Guess I mostly remember how grumpy you were that I took over the flying of your ‘bird. But anyway, you know, I just dived straight down underneath you, came up inside her, I never stopped to think for a second about danger because I could see what would fix things and I just – I just expect a good outcome.” He nodded to himself, shifting his gaze back towards the sea that would always claim his soul. “That’s it, I usually just expect things will work out for the best. Later, when Scotty came over for a cup of coffee and a slice of rant, he said something about me being brave and I felt bad because I really couldn’t pretend I’d been anything like that. Because flying into Two was just the obvious thing to do. There’s no courage if there’s no fear, I remember Dad saying that.”

Virgil kept silent, watching him in profile. He could see Gordon was struggling towards some kind of truth, even if that truth made little sense to his older brother.

“I don’t feel the ‘what ifs’. I think about them, sure, I plan for them, god, in a submersible, I double plan everything, but I don’t feel them. Not like you do.” He shrugged. “I got no clue how you guys function, honestly, the way you worry about every little thing.”

“You can’t tell me you don’t feel fear, Gordo.”

“No, yeah, I do, in the moment. When I had a plane landing on top of me, yeah, sure, I felt fear. But I don’t live there. I’m not even glass half full, I’m glass overflowing. And I get that that’s not necessarily the best way to be, and that it’s guys like you and Scott who keep guys like me from blowing their damn fool heads off, looking down gun barrels and figuring they just won’t be loaded.”

“You’re an optimist. That’s okay. That’s needed, too.”

“Yeah. But that’s the thing, Virge; I figure that’s my job. You get all tangled up in the worrying, I need to keep untangling. Keeping the worry away – that’s what I bring to the table.”

Oh.

“And if I lose that, I lose myself. I lost it in Four, you know I did. I need to be that guy, Virge, the one who gets the laughs, keeps it light. Or else what …”

He closed his lips tightly, and kept his gaze firmly out to sea.

Scott sometimes complained that Gordon was always ‘on’. That no one could be like that and not be fake, somehow. It was because that was the opposite of how Scott tried to live his life, of course, even if Virgil knew there was a whole heaping pile of hypocrisy in Scott’s stance. (This from the man who would refuse to ever show fear in order to comfort his younger brothers? I see you, Scott.)

But the thought that Gordon measured himself by his ability to deny his own fear brought a stab of sadness to him.

He shifted about so that he, too, faced outwards, towards the infinite.

“Gordo. I think I owe you an apology. In fact, I know I do. I guess I’ve been kinda down. Haven’t been myself for a bit. But it’s not your job to fix that.”

Gordon gave a slight shrug.

“Well, yeah. I know. Knock on your noggin, right? That’ll do it.”

Virgil shot him a look.

“You know about that?”

“Effects of concussion? Sure.” Gordon’s mouth twitched. “Depression? Anxiety? Loony levels of paranoia? You’ve been waaay off, Virge. And I should have remembered that this morning instead of doing my best Alan-in-a-snit impression.”

“That boy can sulk,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, no, remember when John did the triple pike with somersault off the barn roof? Man, he freaked me out for ages, he was so angry and mean. It was the first time I realised people could ever change, or be changed, I guess. So yeah, concussion’s been right there on my radar.”

“Huh.” Virgil was silent for a moment, then said softly, “This must have been hard for you.”

“No kind of picnic for you either, Virge. But it’s all okay now though, right?” Gordon waved his hand, vaguely. “You’re back to Grump Factor 3, not 10.”

“I guess.” Virgil hunched his shoulders slightly. “I won’t pretend, though, Gords – this whole thing…” 

“It’s a spooky ass place, Virge, that’s all.”

“No, that’s not all. There’s - there’s no contrails.” Virgil blurted it out as if he were ashamed of the fact. “I can’t see if there’s anything going on in the sky.”

Gordon looked upwards, as if he were seeing the sky for the first time.

“Not with this cloud cover. No way of knowing.” 

“Might not even be anything flying in this area anyway. We’re not under many obvious flight paths.”

Gordon glanced sideways.

“Can’t see the satellites when the weather’s so crap.” 

Virgil nodded. For the first time in too long, he felt as though the IR suit was actually doing its job and warming him from the inside.

“So chances are we’re not going to know if anything’s still flying.”

“Not until a search and rescue chopper lands on the gorgeous island resort of Rona.” Gordon’s smile grew fond. “Tell you what. I’ll tone down the happy happy joy joy if you meet me half way with the worrying thing.”

Virgil sighed, dropping his shoulders. “But it’s my superpower.”

“Yeah. I know. Mine too.”

More silence, but this time it resonated between them, a sub-sonic harmony of such richness it echoed in his bones.

Until something miraculous happened.

“Look.” Virgil grabbed his brother’s arm. “Is that - ?”

“Oh my god, it is! That is sun! Honest to god sun!”

A surprisingly bright patch of sunlight was shining down to illuminate the sea, turning it from a uniform basalt to a deep ultramarine and jade green, flecked with dazzling white.

Gordon watched entranced for a minute, then sighed with immense satisfaction.

“So it is possible. Who knew? Glad I packed my speedos.”

It was astonishing how much Virgil felt his spirit lift at the brief moment of brightness. They sat together and watched the beauty of the sea in front of them, not speaking, just taking in the swells and shallows of colour. It lasted less than ten minutes, but the fact of it lingered, a marker on their internal retinas that spoke of better days to come.

“Unrelenting gloom punctured by brief bursts of dazzling sunshine.” Gordon gave Virgil a quiet grin. “I guess we can live with that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The 12 chapters above refers to part 1 of this story, which is now completed and waiting for beta. After that, we switch to find out what's been happening since the boys were on the island.


	9. Naked Lunch

“Virgil? Virgil, come on bro, wake up.”

Gordon was whispering in his ear. Why was Gordon whispering in his ear?

“Mmmmfgghff.”

“Human, Virge, speak human.”

With effort, Virgil raised his head and peered blearily at the demented chipmunk masquerading as his brother.

“Why are you whispering? And why are you grinning like a supervillain?”

“I’m whispering because I don’t want to frighten it away. Want the weather report?” Gordon’s grin was a feral thing this close, and he jigged on the spot even as he bent over Virgil’s body, still in the FBS.

“Ugh.” Virgil dropped his head back and closed his eyes. “Let me guess. Rain.”

“Noooope.”

Virgil processed that for a moment, think blinked his eyes open. “No?”

“No. It is windy, very, but it is also – well, not gonna call it sunny but it’s definitely Not Rainy, which I think counts as sunshine in Scotland. There is dry. Lots of dry. You know what this means?” Gordon cackled. “Naked time!”

“What?”

Gordon poked his shoulder. “Come on. Time to get up, get naked. Rinse out these suits because I am telling you, Virge, up close and personal is not the fun thing it should be with you just now.”

“You’re no bed of roses yourself, little bro.” 

Another cackle. God, what is wrong with him?

“I know. Come on. Sea bath and freshly laundered suits.” With that he was gone, and Virgil was left to drag himself out of their FBS and outside to face the day.

What he found was a blustery sky with racing clouds, but yes, they were high and light. The steep hill at the head of the island looked sharp and clear for the first time since they’d arrived, and the sudden sense of freshness was exhilarating. Virgil threw his head back and let out a whoop.

From near the gully head he heard Gordon laugh, the sound carried to him on the wind.

“You said it!” he heard Gordon yell back. As he watched, his brother pulled his suit off his shoulders and then shimmied it down to his hips, before pulling his undershirt off and waving it above his head.

Then he was gone, down to his beloved sea, and Virgil found himself following urgently, unzipping as he went.

When he made it down to the beach Gordon had already rinsed his suit and underwear and then thrown himself into the water, shouting at the cold before duck diving down beneath the surface. Virgil pushed his own suit down and off, climbing past Gordon’s suit, haphazardly abandoned up toward the sheltered end of the shale and pebble beach. Then, gingerly, he stepped on the shifting surface down to where the sea foamed and surged against the shore.

“Holy shit, that’s cold,” Virgil gasped. He squatted to rinse his suit and underwear as Gordon had done, and then, before he could second guess himself, he put his clothes behind him, stood, and took two huge steps before dropping down, into the clear water the lighter sky had rendered a pale jade green.

It was beyond cold, and the thought of ducking his head under the water was one that horrified him. But then Gordon was coming up beside him, blowing out water and yelling for happiness, and the option of staying above water was suddenly taken from him.

“No, Gordon, wait – “

Too late. Two hands gripped him at the shoulder and suddenly he was under, his ears and nose burning with the intensity of cold.

He fought his way back to the surface, spluttering and coughing, to see Gordon staying upright in the water as effortlessly as one of his damned seals, scrubbing furiously at his hair as he did so.

“Get washing, Virgil. Gotta get out of here pretty darn quick.” With that he dived back under the water to glide past him, up and onto the rocks.

“You’re a freak, you know that?” Virgil grumbled. But he took Gordon’s advice, rubbing at his head and bending to rinse it before following him back onto the shale beach. 

Gordon dragged his suit, t-shirt and briefs up out of the gully to where he staked them out on the short, springy turf with rocks. He stood with hands on hips and glared up at the sky.

“Wind’s good, but we need more sun.”

“We need – Jesus, Gordon, move – we need to get into shelter.”

Gordon threw his arms open to the wind, a crazed Viking with his blond beard and – was that an all-over tan?

“God, that feels good.”

“It feels,” Virgil glared, pushing him up back towards their shelter, “like hypothermia.” His teeth had started to chatter. How could Gordon, with so much less body mass, not be feeling it? And he heard his dad’s voice, and remembered a cold March day years ago, in Kansas, as they watched Gordon dive into the old millpond.

His father had watched without expression as Gordon happily climbed out of the water to throw himself back in again from the overhanging mill beam, even as cold mist rose from the water’s surface, even as they stood there in jeans and sweaters. Then his father had sighed. “No sense, no feeling, son,” he’d said, and in the background Gordon had shrieked and cavorted as though it were summer, and nothing but sunshine.

“You know what?” Gordon sounded as if he could muse there all day. “I don’t think they’ll dry well like that. I can use some of the fishing line, make a washing line up by Casa de Tracy.”

“Great idea. Just hurry up.”

Grinning, Gordon gathered up his wet suit and underclothes and strolled after his big brother. Virgil turned back towards the hut, hurrying, thinking of the oh-so-small warming cube and how he could possibly wrap his entire body around it. A sixth sense of brotherly protection, long honed, kicked in and he stopped and looked back.

His ridiculous brother was sitting down and attempting to urgently pull his wet IR suit back on. Virgil knew, from bitter experience, that that was an almost impossible task.

“What in the seven hells are you doing?”

“Look.” Gordon motioned with his head over his shoulder, towards the sea, and a spit of rocks extending into it. For a moment, as spray hit and soared above it, Virgil couldn’t see what he was looking at. Then he caught sight of it; a large container, bobbing in the water, stuck against the rocks. No more than twenty metres out.

“Salvage. Could be anything in that.” Gordon grunted as the suit snagged against his skin. “God, come on, stupid suit. That could be food!”

“Sure.” Virgil came back to stand shivering above him. “Or plastic key rings. Or tins of foot powder.”

“No, it’s gourmet delicacies in cans. Lots of cans. Gah.”

It was almost pathetically heroic, watching as his brother fought against his uniform.

“Give it up, Gordon. You’re never getting that back on while it’s wet.”

Gordon glared at him.

“This – this is something I am going to be taking up with Brains. First thing. Uniforms that can be got on no matter what.”

“Good. In the meantime…”

But his idiotic brother was shaking his head. 

“One quick swim and I’m out there. C’mon, Virge, I gotta try.” And somehow, by contorting himself into a one-man Twister game, Gordon had managed to force the suit back onto his wet skin. “Get back inside, Virge, you’ll freeze.”

Infuriating. 

The sun chose that moment to fully appear from behind the clouds, and once again the transformation was startling. Shadow clouds raced across the grass at his feet, but the sun lit that grass to an emerald green almost electric in colour.

Gordon whooped in response and disappeared back down to the sea.

“Oh, hell,” Virgil muttered. All very well for Gordon to tell him to get safe and dry, while he frolicked in a freezing ocean. Wrapping his arms about himself and his wet suit and underclothes, and crouching down to conserve body heat, Virgil watched as Gordon soon appeared in his line of sight well out into the water, stroking sure and strong across the two metre waves. No helmet, of course.

“Scott, I don’t know how you haven’t murdered him years ago,” Virgil muttered. The wind kept rushing past him, leaching heat, and it occurred to him he had to make a better decision; hut or gully. No way he would leave Gordon, so gully, and protection from the wind, it was.

He hurried down, feeling that vague sense of awkward self-consciousness he always did when it was daylight and he was naked and outside. Not that it happened often. He suspected Gordon would happily go naked twenty four seven if the rest of the family hadn’t objected.

His naturist brother had reached the container and was obviously trying to figure out how to pull it back in with him.

Virgil put down his suit and underwear, cupped his hands and called through them, “Too heavy?”

Gordon tugged at it and it lurched off the spit of rock, dipping lower in the water but floating obediently with the force of the waves.

“It’s GDF!” Gordon yelled back.

GDF? What the hell was a GDF container doing in the sea?

And Virgil’s stomach lurched. He heard himself say, “No…”, the sound lingering here in the shelter of the gully, echoing from the rocky sides.

A glaringly obvious answer that his whole body wanted to reject.

Another downed plane. 

Gordon was struggling to bring it along with him as he turned back towards shore. The waves were too big, the container too heavy. It was an absurd battle, bound to fail, and Virgil shouted at him, the heaviness in his gut adding force to his words.

“Leave it! No point!”

Gordon looked up, and to Virgil’s relief, nodded. His hand dropped away from the container.

And a massive gray-blue head rose directly in front of him.

Virgil wasn’t aware of saying anything. No thought, no hesitation, his legs moving before his mind made any kind of decision. He was mid-thigh in the water before Gordon yelled at him.

“Stay there! Stay there, don’t move!”

It was his operational voice, and it stopped Virgil as nothing else could have. This was Gordon in action mode, sure and hard, and Virgil knew to listen. 

Waves slapped at him, hitting his chest at their peak and knocking him backwards. His vision of Gordon and the creature, the shark, god, a shark, a monster, was by turns obscured and cleared as the waves rolled between him and his brother.

“Gordon! God, Gordon, please – “

It seemed as though Gordon wasn’t doing anything, just staring straight at the thing, its pointed nose and black dead eyes somehow hanging above the water as it rode the motion of the waves. And then a larger wave and the thing was gone, and Virgil had never felt fear like this in his life before, ever. His hands had left his sides and were stretched out towards his brother, and he was saying something, nothing, but his whole body was shaking, his mind a white out of frozen thought, frozen feeling, nothing but terror.

And Gordon was gone.

A scream then, something primitive and raw. 

And clarity; he was going in, orders be damned.

But then, Gordon broke the surface again, and he was churning through the water, looking like he was staying in one place as the waves rose and fell but actually powering through them, covering the distance, slowly, so slowly, speed and technique trapped in a nightmare of force and counterforce.

“Come on! Come on!” Virgil took another step, another, straining forward, and a larger wave suddenly lifted Gordon almost above head height before surfing him along on its crest for an impossible ride to drop him into Virgil’s arms. The force knocked Virgil down onto his ass even as he gripped Gordon in a death hold, his feet gone from under him and a terrible moment of realisation that the resurgence would drag him back out with it, into the deeper water, into the waiting shark’s open mouth.

His body twisted in the wave, flailing, and he felt Gordon fighting him – no, grabbing back at him, pulling him towards the surface, his own legs kicking furiously towards the shore.

They both burst into the air at the same time, and the waves helped them, slamming them along and up onto the shale, human flotsam expelled back to the land.

Virgil felt his legs still scrabbling, still trying to get further onto shore. He didn’t care, even as the rocks bit and tore at him.

“Virgil! It’s okay, it’s alright, we’re clear. We’re clear, Virge.”

He stopped, his whole body rigid with tension, breath lost to the water he was choking through. He heard Gordon coughing beside him, spitting out water, groaning, muttering nonsense.

“Fuck.” Gordon shook his head, his chest heaving, up on all fours and head hanging down. “That was… god, Virge, what were you doing?”

“What – what do you mean?” Virgil stopped and coughed out his own mouthful of seawater as he lifted up on his elbows, his chest feeling as if it had a band of steel around it.

“You were coming in!”

“Of course I was coming in. What did you think I was going to do?”

But Gordon wasn’t looking at him, just shaking his head.

“And anyway,” Virgil continued, stung, “how the hell did you get away? I thought it got you, I thought it took you down.”

“So you were going to come in and join the party?”

“I thought it got you!”

“Oh, shit, Virge.” 

“What?”

“You just – “ And then Gordon’s arm was around him again, only this time he was being pulled into a wet and uncoordinated hug, and as uncomfortable as it was, he didn’t resist. He was tight against Gordon’s chest as he felt the harsh fight for air change to breathless giggles.

“Hoo, boy, that was intense. Naked Man to the rescue!”

“Get off,” Virgil said, but a kind of light headed relief almost had him joining in with the laughter.

“Oh, shit, Virge, you’ve done a real number on your hands. Ooh, your knees too.”

“I have? Oh.” Dazedly, Virgil checked himself over, and grimaced. Blood was streaming down his arms from raw elbows, and as he tilted his head he could see more on his legs. With a big brother’s tenderness and care he elbowed Gordon to release him and gingerly pushed himself to his feet.

Gordon dropped and rolled over onto his elbows, grimacing up at him. 

“There’s antiseptic cream in the first aid kit. We better get onto those.”

“Yeah.” Now that they were both out of the sea, the cold reasserted itself in Virgil’s awareness. “Back to home base, come on.” He reached down and helped Gordon to his feet. It didn’t completely surprise him when Gordon immediately reached for another hug as they stood there.

“Thanks, bro,” he heard in his ear.

He tightened his hold briefly in response, then pulled away, slapping Gordon on the back before picking up his bundled suit and underwear.

“Home. Come on.”

“Yeah. Right. Wow. So, that was SharkBert.”

“SharkBert?” Virgil considered his torn hands for a second before mentally shrugging and putting them to use in pulling himself up onto the turf above. The pain that shock and fear had kept at bay was beginning to claim his attention, but the overwhelming relief was still the best anaesthetic he could wish for.

“Yeah. He – or she, I can’t really tell, and you know, wasn’t going to go looking – he was the one I met when I met Ernie.”

“Wait, what?” Virgil stopped and turned to Gordon just clearing the gully behind him. “You what now?”

“Ernie? Remember? The seal? Damn, the senility is strong in this one.”

“No, I mean – you knew that shark was out there?”

“Well, yeah. I figure he was the one you thought you saw the other day.”

“You knew? You knew that monster was around? And went out anyway?”

And Gordon was looking at him like he had two heads. He tilted his own to the side.

“Ye-es?”

“You let me go swimming in there too?”

“Well, what you did wasn’t so much swimming as spluttering a lot – “

“You and your good outcomes. Do you realise what you put me through?"

“Yeah, I know, sorry, bro, I –“

Virgil raised a finger in warning that silenced Gordon. When he spoke, his voice was calm.

“I will, very carefully and with malice aforethought, throttle you. In your sleep. Just so you know.”

There must have been something in Virgil’s expression that got through to Gordon at last. He gave a nervous little laugh.

“You mad?”

“No.” Virgil began walking back, avoiding the rocks where he could. “I’m naked. And cold. And, you know, plotting murder. Just giving you fair warning.”

“But Bert’s not that bad. He was just checking me out. That’s what Great Whites do, you know, the only species that do it, put their heads above the water and have a good look. He didn’t want to eat me, he’s not hungry, he eats the seals. He was just saying hello. You think he remembers me? I think he remembered me.”

Gordon was babbling. Gordon was nervous. Good. He should be bloody terrified.

“Hey, Virgil, come on, it all ended up alright, didn’t it? That container might have had something really good in it. And – oh, shit!”

That made Virgil stop and turn back, a question on his face.

“My briefs! And shirt. I left them here – where are my briefs?”

Virgil joined in scanning the island, as far as they could see.

“Is that them over there?”

Two far distant blots of white, lying on the turf, flipping over in the wind.

Heading for the cliff edge.

“Holy shit!” And Gordon was off, racing across the island, even as the wind caught and lifted his underwear again, rolling them along towards their ultimate destruction.

And Virgil let out a genuine, deep laugh that followed him on his ridiculous chase. 

Sometimes, the universe just gave you a freebie.

Shaking his head, arms wrapped around himself to try to ward off the cold, Virgil kept going towards the hut.

The adrenalin rush had proved to be an exceptional agent of distraction, but now the realisation of what Gordon found in the sea once more filled his mind. A Global Defence Force container. Those things just didn’t get dropped into the ocean by mistake. There was only one likely explanation, and it was one that suggested a conclusion he just didn’t want to reach.

Perhaps two days ago he would have dropped into a state of deep depression. But Virgil had found his balance again, that level of calm and practicality and strength that had always served him so well in the face of impossible dangers and grief. As Gordon said, there was nothing to be done for anyone else. It was time to think seriously about their own long term survival. It was time to accept there would be no rescue planes, no sightseers, no ornithologists; that if they had survived the plummet from the sky, then so could Scott. So could John. There was no second guessing Fate, no bargaining to be made. 

For the first time, the thought of surviving here long-term didn’t fill him with dread. Of course, all such thoughts depended on him persuading his brother that playing with sharks was not a good long-term strategy.

In the distance, Gordon was pouncing on his clothes. He stood up when he had them and then waved them as if they were victory flags, making Virgil chuckle again.

And why not? Life on this island was going to be a series of small struggles each day. Others had lived here, the ruins showed that. They’d died here, too, and there was no one to tell their story. Only they could know if they had found some way to laugh on their island at the edge of the world, to laugh at the hardship and the fear and the loneliness that bit harder than the wind if allowed. Laughing or crying, the gravestones claimed them in the end.

That wouldn’t be the fate of the Tracy boys. No, this would be a story, no doubt wildly embellished by a certain aquanaut, told among a family safe and warm on their tropical island home, one day in the near future. Virgil set his mind to that. May as well make it a story of victories, small though they might be.

And in the meantime, unless they were both competing for the Blue Cashew Award – victory would mean a damp and cheerless shelter, warming cube, a swag, and a young brother by his side, whole and unharmed.

All things considered, Virgil would take the win.


	10. What lies beneath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything changes -now.
> 
> Thanks again to my beta-extreme, Soleil-Lumiere. These last chapters of Part One took more beating than beta-ing. You're awesome, SL.

What Lies Beneath

Gordon lay close against Virgil in the little swag, relatively warm and comparatively comfortable, and thought about sex. Which was about the dumbest thing he could do in that situation, but, you know. He and Dumb Ideas were kind of a thing.

Carefully he eased himself over so that he was facing away from his brother without waking him. There was a faint hint of gray coming around the edge of their blanket door, but there was no point in getting up any time soon. He could hear the wind outside, whipping across the island like a scourge, and the thought of getting up and going out there was one that had him snuggling ever so slightly back into the bag.

Gordon had always loved sex. After his accident and rehabilitation, he set about making up for lost time. “Consenting adults!” was his battle cry, and anyone was fair game if they could answer in kind. He was good in bed, because sex was always an expression of essential character, and Gordon was essentially kind and observant. He figured out the secret early on – please your partner, please yourself. He loved to watch their faces as he took them with him, up, up on that long beautiful wave. Sometimes, he swore, he could see a glorious horizon from up there, and he always strained towards it just as the wave broke and fell into a depth so pure and clear he wished he could stay there forever.

Sex was simply fun, the best fun a boy could have – until it wasn’t any more. 

Gradually – no, screw that, not gradually, it was sudden, and he could name the exact place and person – sex became something altogether more complicated and cynical.

He remembered her name – Tahnee – and the place – Devil’s Point, near Seaside, out of Portland. He’d asked her if she wanted to grab dinner. She said yeah, sure, and he looked forward to it the way he always did. Could be he was making a new friend; could be they’d have dinner, a great conversation, and that would be it, and that would be okay, too. 

Gordon had a lot of friends.

Could be it would lead to oh-my-god brain-bursting sex, and hey, that was always a brilliant way to end the working day.

But then he saw it, just as she turned away from him. He might have missed it, might have been too busy thinking about where they’d go and how it could work out, and later he would wonder how many times he had missed it in the past. But he kept watching her, pleased, and he saw the moment the rapacious gleam came into her eyes.

She wasn’t present in any way that mattered. She wasn’t thinking fun on the beach, she was already stepping into the future, thinking of how she would tell others about bedding an Olympian – he was great on the back end, if you know what I mean, wink wink – or worse, she was thinking of grabbing herself a Tracy.

Since his father’s company had smashed into the top twenty on the Forbes index, Gordon had found it more and more important to watch out for those who sought his presence less for who he was than for the wellspring of wealth that attached to him. He figured he was pretty good at it; there was a look people had when their minds were busy racking up columns of money, and he had learned to slide, smooth and easy, out of their grabbing hands. No fuss, no muss; Gordon Tracy was as slippery as an eel in a jello bath when he wanted to be, and those people found themselves charmingly but ineffably headed into conversational cul de sacs that ended with them insisting they understood perfectly why Gordon had to just duck out for an hour or two, never to return.

But somehow he’d always felt that the connection he needed to make in order to have sex was a strong enough filter to sort out the gold-diggers. Hey, honestly, it didn’t need to be a deep connection, sure; but it had to be there, a liking, a shared sense of humour, or passion for the sea or just interest in others. Guess it was lucky that Gordon liked just about everybody.

Tahnee’s calculating eyes were better than a cold shower for turning Gordon Tracy from firecracker into damp squib.

And after he’d noticed it once, he saw it more and more often. Finding that fun, free kind of Californication became a rare thing. Shore leave from Tracy Island meant heading out of LA or NY and finding a lazy beach somewhere, a place where people didn’t look at Forbes’ richest lists and he was just some guy with a rented board in a rented buggy who had enough cash to buy beer and clams to go around.

Penelope helped, in a way. Odds of him getting anywhere with her, ever, short of world cataclysm or facing death on top of a buried South American death statue? Long. Outrageously long. But then, he wasn’t expected to win gold at the Olympics either, wasn’t expected to recover full body movement after flipping a hydrofoil. Thinking of Penny shifted expectations of sex into a different realm. It became something he didn’t mind waiting and working for.

Great. Now he had a boner in a force 8 westerly and the only warm body within a 100 miles was his big brother.

He would have groaned, only it wasn’t fair to wake Virgil, currently dead to the world and making kinda cute little huffy noises every now and then – in between letting out hellish farts that only guys who wore plaid flannel were able to conjure off nothing but seafood and protein rations. No, he was going to have to deal with this himself, and in the absence of a cold shower, a brisk walk in what lay outside would do wonders.

Carefully he eased out of the swag and stretched, then half-crawled over to their blanket door. It really was murky out there, but beyond his uncomfortable, self-inflicted sexual state, he needed to take a leak anyway. May as well get it over and done with, and so he took a deep breath and then breached the barrier to as filthy a day as could be imagined outside of actual hurricanes.

The rain stung him as he hurriedly found the spot designated as the latrine. Fiddling with the concealed zip, easing the uniform open and then whimpering as his most precious equipment was exposed to the cold – damn, but being marooned in the Orkneys sucked. They could have been on some unknown Pacific Island, where they could have eaten tropical fruit and fish and frolicked on the beach all day, but noooo – they had to be cast away on the dreariest, grayest, wettest, dullest, coldest, ugliest –

And then all complaint left him as he looked out to the east and saw the thing he had been dreaming of for seven days now.

“Virgil! Virgil get your ass out here!” he gave an incoherent whoop and zipped up hurriedly before wrenching open the blanket. “Virgil, come on, get up!”

“Wha – “ Virgil lifted his head, a bear muzzling up through the layers of hibernation. “What is your problem?”

“My problem, brother mine, is that we’ve got company and I’ve got nothing to wear.”

“We’ve – what?” That was the sound of Virgil imploding inside a swag and subsequently wrestling with himself in order to get out. “What? Gordon?” Swearing, a stumble, another word that would fry air less damp than this, and Virgil was by his side. Gordon gave a showman’s flourish towards the eastern coast, as if he were responsible for what powered in the water, two hundred metres out from shore.

“The ornithologists are flying north for the summer early this year,” Gordon said. He felt his senses reeling, dazzled with relief and an easing of an unacknowledged tension.

There were people, with working engines, and they were here. There was no worldwide EMF disaster. They were not going to have to face weeks or months of abandonment. They were not going to have to survive a long-distant winter here. They most likely had not (most terrible dread of all) lost their brothers for ever.

The Tracy boys were going home.

Virgil watched the submarine intently. When Gordon moved to go towards the gully, the only landing place on the island, a hand suddenly grabbed his arm.

“Hold on, Gordon. Let’s not rush this.”

Caution is a good trait, Gordon told himself. He’s just being careful. This is Virgil, Mister Play it Safe himself. Be kind.

“Are you nuts?”

Virgil sent him a quick annoyed expression, then turned his gaze back through the driving rain towards the sub’s conning tower. Without helmets they were both squinting against the sting of squalls coming across their shoulders and still somehow managing to whip into their faces.

“Gordon, stop. Think. What got us here?”

“Oh, come on. You can’t seriously be that paranoid? A sub turns up and you immediately think it’s whoever knocked us out of the sky?”

“You said yourself, it is early for birdwatchers. Who else would be coming here?”

“Maybe people repairing the lighthouse.”

“In March? In this?”

“I know you got a degree in Wet Blanketing and Killing Joy, but could we just not look this gift horse in the mouth?”

Virgil frowned, still peering through the rain.

“I’m sorry, Gordon. I hope it’s a good thing, I really do. But this is too early for fishing, it’s too early for tourists, or bird-watching, or repair work. So why else would someone come here? And who travels for any of those in a sub?"

Dammit. Virgil’s superpower could be persuasive.

“So watching brief?” Gordon gave an eloquent shrug. “I can do that. Unless they look like they’re going past the island. Then all bets are off.”

“Fair enough. In the meantime, I’m getting my helmet on, and so should you. This is ridiculous.”

That last was clearly intended for nature, being a mother.

They both ducked back inside to get helmets, then Gordon perched on the stone wall that formed the skeletal remains of the once-house, legs swinging, watching with avid interest as the submarine ploughed through large seas towards them. Virgil grabbed a protein bar each and stood behind the wall, no less invested in following the progress of the oncoming vessel.

After several minutes, Gordon began to frown.

“I think she’s in trouble,” he said softly. “Look at that pitch. And look – look, aft, she’s leaving a slick behind her. Isn’t she?”

“Think you’re right.” Virgil squinted, leaning forward. “That’s – whoa, that wave broke over the conning tower.”

“Thirty footers,” Gordon said. “They’re gonna have fun coming in through those rocks.” He couldn’t help it; as a fellow submariner, his heart went out towards the unknown people battling so hard towards land. A submarine to him was a place of refuge, a little human-made bubble of security in the midst of an unpredictable, fascinating world that tried to delight and kill him simultaneously. To see a sub listing like this, semi-rolling with the waves, bleeding out, touched the secret knowledge that lay deep in every submariner’s soul; security was an illusion. The sea would win one day.

“Gordon, what can you see on that tower?” 

“You mean the identification sigil? Looks like a kind of circle with a line going up through the middle to the top?”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.” Virgil was tense beside him, his voice tight. “You remember when Grandma and I were stuck in London, no power, bunch of anarchists trying to bring society down?”

Gordon felt his stomach drop.

“You’re kidding. The ones that John said made the first Luddites look like tech-heads?”

“Oh, yeah.” Virgil’s voice had grown deep, almost a growl. “That’s their sigil, right there, on that goddamned sub.”

The people who endangered Virgil and Grandma, who threatened Penny and Parker. Who toyed with an entire city. Who indirectly killed fifteen people in accidents and hospital beds, who terrified children and old folk, all for the sake of an ideology fed to them by International Rescue’s eternal enemy, The Hood.

He felt it then, the switch that flicked inside him, that dropped away the fool like a discarded skin and left the hard man behind to rule his mind. Everything went very still inside him, very clear and very ready.

Without any conscious intent he began cataloguing weapons and tactics, the vulnerable, the possible, the probable. 

“Those assholes took our ‘birds.” Gordon shifted around and dropped down from the wall, hidden from the sea. “They’ve switched their game and got some kind of weapon that can directly target planes.”

“They did at that.” Virgil spared him a long, cool look. “What are your intentions, Gordon Cooper Tracy?”

“That sub’s dying. They’ve got to get to land, and when they do, we’ve got to stop them doing anything like this again.”

Virgil’s mouth thinned, but after a moment, he nodded.

“You’re the one with the training, Gordo. Your call.”

In all his intensity and determination, there was still time it seemed for a little thrill of warmth. He put it away, something for later when the work was done.

Gordon indicated with his head.

“Only place to land is Gully Beach. Their trajectory shows that’s what they’re trying for. That sub’s not big, looks like it draws about ten metres, so it can get in close. They’ll want to come to land. I’ll get down to Mussel Cove, wait for them there. Get on the sub, disable the weapon.”

“Wait, what? Swim out there? Have you forgotten SharkBert?”

Virgil clearly thought he had lost his mind, but that was because Virgil thought of the water as something to be avoided whenever possible. Gordon gave him a quick grin.

“Aw, Virge, that’s only me. You’ll be up here, in our redoubt.”

“Doing what?”

“Being backup. It’s all gonna depend on whether the whammy is part of the sub’s infrastructure or if they can take it out and get it to land.”

“So for now – “

“For now we wait and see.”

They crouched behind the wall, doing just that, as the rain drummed on their helmets and the minutes crawled by. A gap in the wall allowed them to take turns at watching the sub getting closer, dropping and drifting in the rough sea but clearly determined to get to the beach.

Fifty metres out the sub wallowed in the trench in front of a particularly big wave, the conning tower tipping over towards the wall of water gathering itself behind it before being slammed the other way as the wave delivered. They couldn’t hear it under the roar of the sea and the percussion of the rain, but they could both tell the sub was done. Its nose arched upwards before crashing down into the roiling surf, and as the wave subsided they could see the vessel was almost certainly wedged on one of the rock formations that speared upwards from the seafloor here.

“Oh, boy,” Gordon said softly. “Come on, people. Abandon the hell out of that.”

As they watched, the hatch on the conning tower opened and figures began clambering out, barely restrained panic in their motions. Even in the poor conditions it looked as though each one was armed, dark straight shapes secured to their backs. Gordon found he had clenched his hands into fists, the awful sensation of helplessness dousing his desire for military action. Every instinct but one was telling him to get to the beach and be ready to help. 

The other instinct told him to lie still, wait. Too much at stake.

He ran through options in his head, then made a decision.

“I’m going over to the head of the gully.” At Virgil’s first sound of protest, he hurried on. “I’ll stay hidden, but I'll see if they can get a line to land. I’ll help if it looks like they can’t. With the sub wrecked there’s probably no need to worry about the whammy weapon. But I can’t – I can’t just –“

“Yeah.” Virgil nodded. “I get it. You need me too?”

“No. You stay here. I need you to come to my rescue if they’re not as grateful as they should be.”

As they spoke they saw the forward hatch on the sub open and an inflatable dinghy pop out. For a moment it looked as though they’d lost it in the immense waves, but one brave soul managed to grab the trailing line and secure it. Almost immediately more people appeared to attach a motor, heart-stoppingly balancing in the unstable conditions, and then four men jumped into it, leaving others clinging to the conning tower as the dinghy churned away towards the land.

“They’re leaving them!” Gordon cried, but Virgil’s hand grabbed his arm.

“No, look – they’ve got a landing line. They’re just securing passage for the rest.”

At that, Gordon could see it, a long thin line unspooling behind the little boat as it struggled towards the beach.

“I think they’re gonna be fine,” Virgil said, and Gordon could hear the relief in his voice. For their adversaries’ safety, or for the fact Gordon wouldn’t be meeting them alone, he couldn’t tell.

The land rose before dipping down towards Gully Beach, so their view of the landing was obscured. 

“They’ll need to secure that line,” Gordon mused. “Maybe onto the hulk? Or they might have one of those explosive rock punchy things we’ve got for securing lines in rock.”

“No,” said Virgil, and it was a growl again. “They wouldn’t use machines, Gordo. What are you thinking? I’m sure they’d only use their manly muscles.”

“Wow.” Gordon gave an admiring head shake. “When you go dark you bring the snark.”

“And don’t think I’m not telling Brains you call his propulsion hammer an ‘explosive rock punchy thing’.”

“Okay, tough guy. Channel all that aggression towards them.” He rose up slightly to look over the wall, where he could get a broader view of the scene. “The line’s secured, they’ve got it up out of the water. The dinghy’s going back. Easier going out than coming in with this westerly wind blowing offshore.”

“West-north westerly.”

Gordon gave him a look, and Virgil shrugged.

“I’m a pilot. I get wind.”

“I know. I share a swag with you.”

Ha. Virgil might have the power of snark, but Gordon had the zingers.

The dinghy reached the sub again, but what Gordon saw next changed the game.

“Virge! Virgil, look!”

Virgil popped up to look with him over the wall.

Coming out from the forward hatch, carefully maneuvered by the remaining crew-members, was a large metallic unit.

“You think that’s the whammy?”

Virgil nodded slowly. “Probably. Why else would you risk your life in these seas? And they’re bringing it to land so they can keep doing what they’ve been doing.”

“You think they’d set it up on Rona?”

“Why not? We don’t know what kind of range this thing has. They could hold the UK and parts of Scandinavia and Iceland and maybe even France to ransom from here. We don’t know how many others they’ve already brought down.”

The crew had lowered the unit to the dinghy, with two other long metallic boxes.

Gordon watched, intently. Three of the other crew members were stepping back, and one man plus a second already in the dinghy began the perilous trip towards the beach against the run of the sea.

“Maybe it’s not, though,” he said, reluctantly. “Maybe it’s survival gear? Maybe it’s supplies? Maybe these guys are GDF and they captured the sub from your looneys?”

“Not my looneys.” Virgil tightened his mouth again. “But I take your point. Why don’t you go over and ask them nicely?”

“Ha, yeah. If they are hostile, we lose the element of surprise. If they’re not, it doesn’t matter anyway. So all we can do is – “

“Wait and see. We’ll know pretty soon once they get to land what their intentions are.”

“Wait till they’re all on land.” 

Virgil gave a dark, piratical smile. "Wait till they’re safe so we can smack them with a clear conscience.”

“You better believe it.”

It became even more excruciating, sitting out of sight and watching a group of people who may or may not be hostile bringing to shore something that may or may not be a weapon of terrifying power. 

After ten minutes the dinghy disappeared under the eye-line inshore, and out on the sub two more men appeared from inside, clinging where the others had been, obviously waiting for the dinghy’s return. Several minutes after that, four men appeared from out of the gully, carrying the metallic unit between them. From closer range it could be seen that each had a pistol of some sort on his belt with one of the latest assault weapons strapped to their back.

“So things just got interesting,” said Gordon, softly. “They’re definitely not GDF. They sure do like that circle sigil of theirs. And they’re armed to hell and back because you never can tell when a baby seal might go rogue.”

“Nope.” Virgil shifted, as if settling his weight in readiness for an onslaught. “Makes you wonder how the sub got in the state it was in, doesn’t it?”

That was a hopeful thought.

“You think the GDF attacked it? Niiice.” 

“And what would that be they’re bringing up now?”

Gordon peered through the rain, as two of the men went back down to the gully and then reappeared carrying the other long boxes. Quickly they set them down on the high point of the tiny slope and began pulling out rods and large swathes of something oddly reflective. After a minute, Gordon drew in his breath.

“Shit. That’s macro-cam.”

“What now?”

“We use it – WASP uses it, for camouflage. It completely reflects light, creates a doubled mirror effect from slanted panels on the edge. Basically, you can disappear into the landscape with it. From above, that will reflect the turf around, make it completely invisible. And it shields from heat detectors, too.”

“How come I haven’t heard of this?”

“Well, we don’t let just anyone play with our toys.” Gordon shook his head slightly. “I got no clue how these half-assed clowns got hold of some of this. It’s top secret.” Oddly enough it was that fact that sent a skewer of concern into his gut. If these people had access to this kind of technology… In a way it made it even more important to stop whatever they were planning.

The men created a frame from some of the rods, then attached the macro-cam to it before working to create a stand from the others.

“They’ll put the whammy in that,” said Virgil. “Need it to be stable.” He glanced at Gordon. “You think we should take a run at them now?”

“Too soon, too open between here and there.” Now that things were becoming clearer, Gordon felt that urge to action again, his muscles tight, his mind focused. “Revised plan. The dinghy’s on its way out to the sub. I’ll go down here – “ he indicated with his head to the south of their position, “- get around the headland, surprise them when they come back in.”

“Wait. Hang on a minute.” Virgil turned to face him. “That’s six men you’d be taking on alone. Six armed men. How is this in any way a smart plan?”

“Because it’s just a diversion.” Gordon could see it all, clearly. “I’ll be a pest down there. That will take these guys away from up here. You’ll wander over to the whammy and give it a tap or two.”

“They’ll shoot you first thing!”

“No, they won’t, because they’re not looking for anyone to be on the island. I’ll have the element of surprise and then some. I figure three of them will faint straight off.”

“Uh-huh. Then what?”

“Then I grab a weapon and play pin the projectile in the pinhead.”

Virgil shook his head, stubborn.

“I don’t like it.”

“Only because it’s not you down there.”

“And why is that?”

“Because –“ and really, sometimes Gordon amazed himself with his patience, “I am the best swimmer, I am the best fighter, and I am the best shot. Oh, and also, because you are the best nerdy engineer. You’ll know the pressure points of that thing. Come on, Virge. The only thing we really have to do is destroy that.”

For a long moment, Gordon thought his brother was going to continue arguing. Then, at last, Virgil sighed.

“You know, it’s funny seeing someone else on our island,” he said. “Kinda sticks in my craw that the first people we’re seeing are doing something like that. I don’t think Rona deserves to be used like this.” He looked directly at Gordon. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay. But once I whack that thing I am down there with you.”

“Sure.” 

Virgil clearly wasn’t happy, but then, he would be denying his super power if he was.

Gordon, though… it wasn’t that he wanted this confrontation. Not really. Not at all. Hey, he was a lover, not fighter.

And yet, that cold, dark place inside him was lit up with some kind of hellish light, and somehow he found himself saying, “Sex and death and rock’n’roll. This is gonna be fun.”

“You’re going to play this smart, Gordon.”

“Hey, you know me. Okay, scratch that. I’ll channel John. Cool and smart.”

“Good.”

“What Would Johnny Do?”

Virgil actually harrumphed. God, he loved this brother of his. The thought came to him of Virgil at the top of the gully, exposed to fire from below, and Gordon knew he’d do everything he could to make sure that didn’t happen. That would be his number one priority. Make a lot of noise, be a lot of nuisance, make sure Virgil wasn’t left to face the music alone. Playing to his strengths.

He risked one more look over the wall and saw that everyone left on the island was busily engaged with the machine, poking and prodding and setting up. He clapped his hands, softly, and looked at his non-working watch out of habit.

“I’d say we should synchronize watches, but mine’s dead and yours is smashed, so… gimme about twenty-five.”

“Will do. Gordon –“

“Mmm?”

Virgil reached for his shoulder, and that was his raw look, the one he pulled out when shit was beyond real, the one that showed too much.

“Destroying that is not the only thing we have to do. If – don’t – “ For a moment, Virgil looked like he was fighting to say fifty things, when none was too many and a thousand not enough. 

And Gordon didn’t need to hear it, anyway.

“I’m gone.”

“Gordon –“

“Virge, I gotta go. It’s okay, it’ll be okay.”

And he could feel Virgil’s fear for him, as if it was tangible, something he could wrap around himself, when he needed to be free and fast and calm. So he gave him the best he could, a smile from his heart, and gripped his arm in farewell.

“Don’t worry so much.”

Huh. As if.

But the dinghy was halfway out to the sub, and he had some cliff to climb, some sea to get to, some villains to unleash his WASP-honed Obnoxious Brat power upon. He had to go. 

Time to light this candle.


	11. A mother's Betrayal

Out the back of their little hill and quick as he could, down low, running for the end of the island. No shouts to tell him he was seen. He was betting, hard, on their focus being elsewhere. And on them not having a clue that two of IRs best (the best, come on, who was he kidding?) were actually here and waiting for them, ready to take them on.

The wind was fierce away from their ruin, and that helped, too. No one would be looking west if they could help it; their bodies would be turned away in instinct and self-defence, and the crew coming back in the dinghy would have their hands full working against the run of the sea.

It wasn’t that this would be easy, as such, but there were factors in their favour, and he’d take them.

So, first job; get down the cliff at the south end of the island.

The land dipped lowest near the little inlet and isthmus, but that was where the surge was strongest, being channelled into a wedge of rock. It would be like dropping into a giant concrete mixer to try that route. The cliffs grew steepest directly south. But Gordon’s plan was to skirt the southernmost point, staying as close to the edge as he could, until it began to curve down and eastwards towards Gully Beach. There was a spot along that part he would never have considered tackling ordinarily – no point previously, and too dangerous to be exploring for no good reason. It would have to do.

His lungs were beginning to burn. Ugh. Too many hours spent keeping warm and dry in their shelter, not enough time spent working out. He could almost hear Kayo’s voice saying that. God, he missed her. What he wouldn’t give to have her here beside him, revelling in the fight as she did.

But almost as he thought it, he heard Commander Khan’s voice, too.

“No point wishing for what you don’t have. Work with what you do.”

So what did he have?

The element of surprise. The elements themselves. Local knowledge. An awesome big brother who would do what he had to, no matter what he faced.

And his own, not inconsiderable skills of – well, of being pretty damn awesome himself.

The wind chose that moment to almost blow him over with a sudden, stronger gust, and he took the hint. Less thinking, more running.

He reached the edge and kept back far enough from it that the wind wouldn’t be tempted to lift him over. Sixty feet down to the sea here, not a good look. He turned to his left and began running east, keeping low, every now and then looking over to the little group on the top of the small slope. They had the maxi-cam set up fully now, flapping wildly in the gale but secure, and its back flap dropped low enough that all he could see were the legs of the men working on the whammy. Above that their bodies seemed to disappear into thin air. It would be funny, any other day.

“See, Virge? Told you they were half-assed.” 

Hehe. Even now, Gordon Cooper Tracy bringing the sass.

He reached the point he was looking for, where the cliff height began to descend sharply to a far more friendly thirty feet or so. Still wouldn’t choose to jump off it, but it was less bowel-clenchingly high than further south. An instant thought of the climbing equipment Scott loved hauling out any chance he got and –

Nope. What you have, not what you don’t. Come on, GC, get your head in the game.

There, a kind of notch in the uniform edge of the cliff, and he eased himself carefully into it. A body length drop to a worn runnel that led to sharp edged drop off. Then it became a matter of picking his handholds and finding his feet. Piece of cake.

“Psicobloc heaven, right here, Virgil.” It took him back to deep-water soloing in Majorca with Keeley and Matt and Tekut, rock-climbing above the sea in those days after his recovery, when his father must have thought he’d paid a fortune to get his son fixed only to see him intent on risking it as much as possible, wherever and whenever he could. Scott had dragged him aside, finally, asked him what the hell he thought he was doing and hadn’t they all been put through enough worry? And he couldn’t explain it, the way the need to reclaim his body was so acute, the way testing it and risking it made him feel like he owned it again. 

And here he was, using those skills with a lot more at stake than his own sexy ass.

It came back to him, how to flatten his body against the rock, how to arch out when he needed to make a shift, how to not look beyond the next secure hold. The sea roared and boomed at him, and that was okay, he liked that. She’d catch him if he fell.

But he didn’t. He made it to ten feet above the wave line, waited for a surge, and deliberately timed his drop.

And now – now he was in his element, and it would be fine, no biggie, except that the sea was doing its best to remind him how much she hated being taken for granted. 

The waves were ferocious, the wind whipping them eastwards against the deeper current that flowed south past the island. With the vast expanse of ocean to the west of Rona Island, the fetch of the swell was huge. Gordon found himself in the middle of a massive stochastic process, current, wind waves, and thousand mile swell all working to create a whorl of random energy.

So. Do what he did best. Go with the flow.

The sea surface waves wanted him to go eastwards, and that was fine by him.

Every now and then the swell lifted him so far beyond his capacity to control it that the adrenalin would flood his body in a surge of its own. It was exhilarating. Probably should be terrifying, but in his experience, terror only existed where there was any kind of option. When there is nothing to be done, a kind of acceptance can be found, and Gordon knew, too, that the sea never took a lick of notice what the hell you were feeling. May as well take the rush for what it was, and if you made it round the coast, you’d have a hell of a story to tell.

A trough, a random kick back upwards, and he barely bothered swimming. This was Gordon Tracy as flotsam, saving his energy, looking to when he’d need it, when it would make a difference, when he and his big brother would do something damn terrific for the world – whether the world ever knew about it or not.

And that was a sudden and sobering thought.

He realised, somewhere in the back of his mind, he had already been rehearsing the story of today. He had already begun composing exactly how he’d tell Alan (“So yeah, huge waves, right, and I just rode those suckers, whoosh”, lots of sound effects and hand-waving subtitles); how he’d assume the air of the seasoned fellow warrior with Scott (“Oh, yeah, tough situation, but me and Virgil got the job done”); how he’d gloss over the danger with Grandma but let her know they were big damn heroes anyway. He’d dork out with John, tell him pretty much exactly how it was, because John would let him and never judge; and for Kayo it would be action replay, all the way.

It hadn’t occurred to him, until now, that none of that might happen.

They’d take out the whammy. He had no doubt about that. Good outcome, right? This would work, he’d make a diversion, he’d bring them down on his head and keep them there while Virgil did his best deconstruction work up above.

But – that was as far as his ‘good outcome’ went.

Another long swell, taking him up to where he could see the inlet, the old rusted hulk of a long-forgotten ship, and the dinghy, almost back to the beach, being tossed about in the wild, white water.

There was a sharp pang in his belly. He wanted, suddenly and keenly, to see his family again. He wanted to tell them hey, we had this adventure, Virgil and I, and it was tough, but we survived the crash of Two, we survived the crash of Four, we made it to the island and we made it through Virgil’s concussion and we took out the machine that did that to us. We did good, guys.

Images of kelp shoes and chasing underwear and Virgil’s pirate beard cascaded in his mind, and he realised, with cold, clear certainty, that no one would ever know what happened here. That story would be lost, their story, and those on Tracy Island would never know what happened to their boys.

And it hurt, a child’s hurting, a child’s grief.

Because ultimately, he wanted to hear his Dad say it, what he so rarely ever said.

“You did well, Gordon. I’m proud of you.”

And that was not going to happen. Not now, not ever. So maybe – maybe it was time to grow up.

Maybe it was time to accept that sometimes you did the things that needed to be done and you did them knowing you would never be thanked, never be applauded for it. 

Maybe that’s what being a man was?

The last thing he thought before beginning the fight against the waves to cut across and in to the beach was simply a name, and two blue eyes, infinitely kind, infinitely sad.

Penny. 

Then he was nothing but body, working through the water as fast as he could, to where the dinghy was being pulled up onto the shore, three men scrambling out onto the shale, another pulling hard to bring it to safety.

A last second wave swept him in to the rocks on the port side of the beach, and he grabbed at them, slid back, grabbed again, and his feet found the shifting shoreline, let him scrabble up and into the shelter of the outcrop.

Two of the crew were already making their way up the end of the gully. One was standing, watching as the fourth man kept working to secure the dinghy.

He’ll do.

Swiftly, silently, Gordon left the rocks and wrapped his arm around the man’s neck, cutting off his air with a knuckle into the key pressure point. A kick of a leg, helplessly into the air, and that was all the resistance the man had. This was a Kayo special, and Gordon was a master.

Even as the unconscious man was slipping through his loosened arms he was wrenching the hand gun from the man’s belt. 

“Hey –“

It was almost funny, near enough, the look on the other man’s face as a blue-uniformed ninja in a helmet took out his pal, so Gordon laughed. Then he fired.

Aim to stop them, because Virgil was unarmed up there, but if he happened to take out the guy’s balls, well…

A scream, and the man was down, clutching his upper chest, and the other two were turning, yelling, shock and fear and anger right there. Gordon fired twice, hit one who toppled sideways with a shriek of outrage (huh, not fear, that one needed watching, he was tough and clearly not hurt near enough), caused the other one to turn back and scramble over the top onto the surface of the island (coward, good to know).

He fired again, randomly, into the rocks. A general invitation to the party. Come on fellas, don’t let me down.

And they didn’t. The head of the gully was suddenly full of people, four, no five, Coward Boy at the back, and Gordon coolly gave the first one a party favour in the form of a bullet to the shoulder, even as he thought, now Virgil, now. The man he shot fell, gasping with shock, but the man behind him used his companion’s fall to search for the attacker, and his eyes met Gordon’s.

Okay. Game on.

Time to move.

He dived sideways, back behind his rocks, as the first shots from an assault rifle echoed in the small space. Chips of stone flew from above his head.

No good staying here, they had the numbers and the firepower, had to move again. But his options were limited, there was no manoeuvring room here. 

So give them something to think about.

He popped up, firing, and he heard yelling, directions from one, terror from another, and shots were hitting everything but him. 

Down again, and he heard more yelling. They weren’t going to rush him. These pudknockers weren’t fighters, for all their weaponry. Hell, they’d filed down into the gully like Boy Scouts on a picnic.

So take a chance. Make a run. See what they do with that.

He vaulted over the rocks, firing, and made for the dinghy.

And they stopped firing, the guy in charge screamed the order, as Gordon knew he would, because that dinghy was the only thing they had to get them off the island.

Only he wasn’t aiming for the dinghy, he sped past it, and threw himself behind the old hulk, down low where the water slapped and sprayed, behind the last sheet of metal left on the skeletal frame.

Now the bullets were flying again, tinging dully into the old boat’s side. They may have well been firing straight into the air for all the good it was doing. Another quick look, and one of the clowns was standing up, thinking Gordon was being kept down.

Not with shooting like that, he wasn’t. 

Aim, fire. Another shriek, another one down. That made two with Virgil, five wounded, three still upright, and one of them was useless, shrinking back down on the beach, not even worth a bullet. 

Hell, he thought. Damn. I might even win this.

A flood of hope in his body, an extra burst of warm fire in his belly as he checked the gun, counted the bullets, another six, more than enough –

And then she betrayed him.

A random wave against the run of the sea. Twice as big as anything coming in to shore, and they were already big, but this one was born of the deep chaos far out from land and it swept in and over Gordon, tossing him off his feet like they were made of paper, crashing him into the metal frame and then through that to smash shoulder first into the gully side, surging past him when it was done to finally fall back with a vast suction that pulled half the shale off the beach with it.

And Gordon, dazed and disoriented, was left lying at the feet of a man with the eyes of a zealot, and a gun pointing straight at his face.

“I don’t know who you are, or where you came from,” the man said, fury in every syllable, “but you’re well and truly fucked now, aren’t you?”


	12. Fall Together Redux

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, my deepest gratitude to my wonderful beta, Soleil-Lumiere.

Fall Together Redux  
“Gordon-“

And Gordon is looking at him, impatient, full of wanting, needing, to just get on and do, and Virgil’s asking him to stop, wait, take a moment, just a moment to be here and be safe and be his little brother.

And it’s not enough.

“Virge, I gotta go. It’s okay, it’ll be okay.”

A world of maybe, a perilous perhaps, but Gordon is smiling at him, not grinning, a real smile.

“Don’t worry so much.”

A quick squeeze of Virgil’s forearm and he’s gone, that fast, and Virgil is still working on the words that will hold him to his promise.

It’ll be okay.

He’s gone, and that means Virgil has to step the fuck up.

He can see how quick and smart Gordon is, how good he is at this stuff, running doubled-over across the hilly terrain. Bent so low he flows across the turf, and Virgil is torn between watching him and watching the anarchists with equal intensity, knowing that they have the power and the weapons to stop that flow in a heartbeat.

A last swell of the hill and Gordon is gone from his sight completely.

Alright. Okay. Time to focus.

It will take Gordon about twenty, twenty five minutes to get around the headland, at least. Virgil takes a second to recognise that he has absolute confidence that his brother can manage that, even in these high seas. All he has to do now is stay out of sight and watch. That’s doable, if painful; the minutes crawl past as he witnesses the machine being fussed over by these deluded and dangerous idiots, as they work to stabilise the canopy that will hide them from others, from justice.

Well, not if the Tracy boys can help it.

He counts the minutes under his breath- an old trick, practised with Scott, getting the seconds exactly right so that his minute is perfect. The machine is set into a stand reconstructed on the spot as more of these people make it over from the submarine. Seven now, clustered near the weapon or coming up from the beach.

Virgil feels cold, even though his suit is proof he can’t be. He feels urgency, and fear, but his act of courage is to wait motionless in the face of both until the time is right. His is the essential task, Gordon’s the diversionary, pointless if there’s not something to be diverted from.

The sea booms under the tiny land bridge to the west, louder than ever with these waves.

And almost lost in the boom, the crack of a firearm.

It’s coming from Gully Beach, and it stirs up the seven men as if a celestial stick has been stuck into their terrestrial ants’ nest. Five go running to the gully, two remain behind, first staring after their companions and then bending back to the machine, setting its deadly purpose into readiness. More planes to be plucked from the sky, more families to be devastated by their ruthless ideology.

Which is when Virgil grabs the metal rod, vaults the wall, and runs.

He’s always been fast, even when lumbering under the weight of mechanical armour, his great strength propelling him across the ground in long, powerful strides. Now that strength is sending him with such speed towards the canopy and the men and the machine beneath it that he barely realises he’s doing it.

One man looks up at the last second but Virgil is not stopping. His fist is ready and the man’s head snaps backwards as if it’s met a slap from God.

The other is so shocked by Virgil’s sudden appearance that he fumbles for the pistol in his belt, not even shouting, mouth open but useless with the fact of Virgil’s body slamming into his and sending him hard into the ground. One punch, two, and Virgil is getting to his feet, mind astonishingly clear, almost calm. His focus is now, his task is here, and he has always been a man who can summon his all for the needs of others.

An array of buttons and dials and relays meets him, but Virgil doesn’t care. He doesn’t need to understand this thing, he needs to destroy it. The antithesis of what he does instinctively, but that which destroys must be destroyed, and Virgil spends only a few seconds working the basics out before he raises the steel rod above his head and brings it down with every ounce of power he has, point first, into the dial marked ‘Output’.

And again, and again. Sparks fly, delirious, and the steel brightens in their light, alive again after so long, bringing light once more to Rona. Each spark correlates in light with the popping sounds coming from the beach, short and bright and hard.

The fifth blow, and something goes beyond a spark into a brilliant burst of energy that knocks him backwards with its force onto one of the men already out on the floor.  
Smoke, spurting and acrid, billowing from the machine as more sparks fly into the canopy and the rain, a miniature electrical storm rising from the ground in feeble imitation of what the Rona skies can bring.

There’s no shout, no howl of outrage, because Gordon is good at what he does and he’s keeping five men, more, busy down there in that small space, and he has to be because now Virgil’s focus can shift that is a lot of noise he’s hearing, shouts and firing and he needs to be there, now, this task is over and he needs to be there.

Except everything is suddenly quiet.

It takes him a moment, stunned by the explosion as he is, to realise. But it has definitely gone quiet in Gully Beach, and that might mean Gordon has won, but there’s an instinct, raven-dark and vicious, that tells him different.

He drops into a crouch, watching, ready, and something in him spears like ice into his heart as he sees the first figure coming up from the beach and it’s not blue, it’s not blue.  
The man is looking behind him, gesturing, shouting, and then there are three more people – and the one in the middle, helmet gone, blond hair darkened by rain, is fighting and struggling and oh god, he’s alive. Gordon’s alive.

No one’s looking over towards the weapon, everyone’s attention is being hijacked by his outrageous little brother who has of course been capturing the spotlight whenever he could, however he could, since he was two.

One of the men raises a gun and whips it across Gordon’s head. Gordon sags, but comes back up, kicking outwards, and the man’s knee pops sideways. Even a hundred yards away, Virgil can hear the scream.

Virgil stands up from the crouch, aware of how pointless it is, knowing that his part of the task is done and now he just has to get to Gordon. There’s no cover between him and the four people by the gully, so there’s no point in subtlety. One last glance at the still-spitting wreckage and he’s turned to run towards his brother.

Which is when he sees the leading man raise his arm and hears a crack and sees Gordon jerk and sag but this time he doesn’t come up, he hangs there, blue and yellow and red, and the man with a broken kneecap is still yelling but the other two reach for Gordon, take him, they take Gordon and they stand on the top of the small cliff and they swing him once, twice before swinging him the third time into the air and outwards off the cliff.

A small sound, a gasp of denial, but Virgil has no more energy to spare. Everything he has left is going into this thighs and lungs and heart, because he is running, and he’s always been fast but never like this. There’s a shout, and the man who shot Gordon, oh god he shot Gordon, is turning towards him and lifting his arm and Virgil doesn’t hear the shots he knows are coming towards him but it doesn’t matter. They can shoot him through the head, his heart would keep pounding, his legs keep working, until he found Gordon again.

Close enough now to see their expressions change to fear, because they can see his face. They know he has death in his eyes. Close enough now to barrel through the man with the gun, taking the two seconds as he does so to grab the man’s head and wrench it around so hard the crack is like a gunshot. Another man, gibbering, backing away in terror, another on the ground, and that’s good, that’s all that is left, and Virgil doesn’t care about them anymore. 

The cliff edge rises slightly, tufts of grass flattened towards the sea by the wind whipping across the land, and Virgil keeps running, always been fast, keeps running, pounding against the ground until his feet meet nothing and he is falling, arms still pumping, down and down and down into the heaving sea.

The meeting is brutal, and he loses his breath and his sight, nothing but churning white water around and above him, and he’d panic only there’s no time. Gordon is somewhere in this, and how can he find him?

Because he’ll float. His suit, the buoyancy chambers embedded in there, he’ll float, and he’ll float with his face to the sky.

So Virgil needs to find the air.

And he does, graceless and floundering, but he finds the grayness of sky, and there, close and quiet and still, he finds his brother, too.

The little brother who is never quiet, never still, and now the only movement comes courtesy of the waves tossing them both.

Virgil says something, maybe his brother’s name, maybe just a prayer without words, and then he is fighting the waves, bringing everything he has and is to the last, simplest task of his life. 

To reach his brother, and hold him.

He can see Gordon facing upright, his eyes closed, his mouth a line, white, so white. But near enough, one last push and he’s near enough for a hand to reach out and grab him, pull him close.

“I’ve got you,” he says, his mantra. “Gordon. Gordon, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.”

And there must be magic in his voice, because he feels it, the moment Gordon stirs.

“That’s it, that’s it, little brother, come on.” And Gordon raises a hand to clutch at Virgil’s arm, but there’s no strength there, nothing at all, and Virgil is afraid, so very afraid now.  
Already they’re thirty metres out from land, and the sea is sweeping them out further. Away from Rona and the strange peace they’d found there. Out into the wildness of water and sky, where nothing would be found except the last thing.

Gordon was saying something. Of course he was. Gordon would speak past the end, if he could.

“The sea,” Gordon says. 

“Yeah, we’re in the sea,” Virgil says. His brother mutters something, then sighs and seems to settle in Virgil’s arms. 

“Going home.”

“Yeah, Gordy, yeah.” Virgil holds him just a little tighter as they ride the next swell, as the land disappears further from their sight and the wind takes them away from the bloodshed, away from the world. “We’re going home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where we leave Part One. Part Two is on its way. I do realise this is almost literally a cliff-hanger... I hope you'll come with me in Part Two, where we find out what has been happening with (most of) the rest of International Rescue.


End file.
